Past Secrets by Cathy Kelly Page A

medium-fast lane where she pushed off into the water.
    The Olympic swimming selectors were unlikely to be calling on her any time soon, but over the last six months she’d worked her way up to swimming sixteen lengths each time and she knew she was getting faster, no matter how unprofessional her forward crawl. She felt more toned too but that wasn’t the primary reason for the exercise.
    What she loved about swimming was the solitude of the pool. Even if the lanes were full and every noise was amplified by the water, when her head was down and her body was slicing through the pool, she felt utter peace.
    This was her time, time for Faye alone.
    Six months previously, when she’d paid for the swimming complex membership, she’d realised it was the first time in seventeen years she’d indulged herself in something that didn’t directly benefit Amber. Even the CD player she used was an old one that Amber had discarded when she’d saved up her pocket money for an iPod.
    The money she’d spent on the membership fee could usefully have gone somewhere else. Amber would need a whole new expensive kit for art college, and there would surely be trips to galleries abroad. There never seemed to be enough money for all the things Faye thought Amber should have. But the pool had called to her.
    ‘I wish I was into swimming,’ Grace had begun to say on the days that Faye took an early lunch. Grace and her husband Neil ran the recruitment company together. Grace regularly said they couldn’t have done it without Faye, and Neil, who actually worked very little, was smugly convinced its success was all down to him.
    ‘Swimming sounds so easy, swim, swim and the weight falls off,’ Grace had said.
    Faye grinned, knowing that Grace liked the idea of exercise and the results that exercise provided but wasn’t that keen on actually doing it.
    ‘Is it better than running, do you think?’ Grace went on. ‘I’d quite like to run but I’ve weak ankles.
    Swimming could be the answer.’
    ‘You’d get bored in a week,’ Faye told her. Grace was a chataholic and got anxious if she hadn’t had at least four friends phone her a day in between her hectic schedule of business calls.
     
    ‘There’s nothing sociable about swimming. You put your head into the water and plough on. You can’t hear anyone and you can only see what’s ahead of you.’
    It was like praying, she often thought, although she didn’t say that to Grace, who’d have thought she was abusing recreational pharmaceuticals. But it seemed like that to Faye here it was only you
    and God as you moved porpoise-like through the water, nobody else.
    ‘Really? No Baywatch male lifeguards?’ ‘I haven’t noticed any,’ Faye said drily.
    ‘Well, who needs a Baywatch lifeguard anyway?’
    Grace said.
    Which was, Faye knew, her way of moving on to another line of conversation. Because Grace, although happily married, had many fantasies about a muscle-bound hunk who’d adore her. It was strange when Faye, who’d been on her own for most of the past seventeen years, went out of her way not to notice men at all. She was with Billie Holiday on the whole men issue: they were too much trouble. And she’d learned that the hard way.
    Lunchtimes could be busy in Little Island Recruitment because that was when staff from other offices got the opportunity to slope off, march into Little Island, relate the sad tale of their current employment and discuss the possibility of moving elsewhere where their talents would finally be appreciated. But today when Faye arrived back from her swim, damp-haired, pleasurably tired out and dressed in her old reliable M & S navy suit, reception was empty except for Jane behind the reception desk.
    ‘Hi, Faye,’ said Jane cheerily and held up a sheaf of pink call slips. ‘I’ve got messages for you.’
    The office was very high-tech and designed to impress. Nobody could fail to be dazzled by the glass lift, the stiletto-crunching black