None of them, anyway, remotely resembled anyone Marmion had met at her North London comprehensive, where her placid Quakerism had made her an oddity even among the ethnic and social mix of her classmates. None of them remotely resembled her family, either, which came as more of a surprise. Marmion had imagined Cambridge as a world full of Hayters, earnestly committed to a life of intellect and art.
But they had got along from the start, the five of them. A motley crew, Fay had called them, when she’d invited them to dinner a couple of weeks into their first term. It seemed aeons ago now, that time when they were still getting to know each other. Fay had some connection to St Anne’s, and to the choir – she often came to evensong, and had a seat reserved for her at concerts and carol services. But she had taken a particular interest in their little group. She’d adopted them, people said, sometimes enviously – because there were certainly benefits to Fay’s friendship. She had a beautiful house in Newnham, and membership at Glyndebourne. And she was interesting, too. Fascinating, at least in the sense of being a puzzle. She wasn’t well-preserved in the conventional sense – her hair was being allowed to go grey without resistance, and she rarely wore make-up or jewellery – but it was obvious that she had once been beautiful, and when you saw that, you had to admit that she still was.
As to who she was, that was less easy to tell. She hinted at having been a professional musician, but none of them had ever found any record of her career. She sometimes mentioned business commitments, but they never saw her occupied with them. She seemed to be alone in the world, but she often spoke as if there were other people in the shadows, an extended family of ghostly siblings and cousins and retainers who filled the house when they weren’t there. Her generosity was lavish, but every time they began to be sure of their importance to her, there would be a casual reference to other calls on her time that made it clear they weren’t by any means at the centre of her world. And then, as graduation approached and they could feel their association with Fay waning, the trip to High Scarp had been proposed, and they had understood that the invitation was a compliment she rarely extended, an honour they couldn’t refuse.
Fay herself was both the same and different up here, Marmion thought, crossing the garden now to the wooden outhouse where she and Bill were sleeping. Her hair was swept up in the same unfashionable bun she wore in Cambridge, and the colour and style of her clothes was the same, although the skirts had turned into trousers for Cumbria and a thick jumper had replaced the famous long grey cardigan. It was as though someone had designed her, an art director in a theatre or an opera house, with wardrobes for town and country. A Britten opera, perhaps. The powerful matriarch without a family to rule over.
That thought made Marmion smile: it was the kind of thing Bill would say, she thought. Well, perhaps after three years you did start to think like each other. She let herself imagine Bill saying those words and looking at her with a grin that suggested he saw her as a different kind of matriarch: a happier and more fruitful one. She halted for a moment to enjoy the view, and to savour her own good fortune.
*
The atmosphere in the kitchen owed as much, Bill thought, to the four people crammed into it as to the efforts of the elderly range. The window had long since steamed up, and the smell of bacon and toast was making his stomach rumble pleasurably.
‘Plate,’ said Judith, and he grabbed a dish from the table and held it out to receive fried eggs from the pan. There was a sizzle of fat, a flare of steam in their faces. Judith smiled, nudging a lock of hair off her cheek, as he slid the plate into the oven. ‘Good boy.’
‘At your service.’
This was fun, Bill thought. At home, the hotel kitchen was out of bounds, and in the family’s poky little kitchenette cooking was a chore, not a pleasure.
Cressida, flushed with heat and exertion, thrust a handful of cutlery at him.
‘The table needs laying,’ she said.
‘Right-oh.’ Bill saluted, suppressing the unreasonable feeling that he liked being bossed about by Cressida less than by Judith, and pushed through the door to the dining room.
This was the nicest room in the house, he thought, as he set the silverware down. It doubled as sitting room and dining room, and apart from the long table which ran beneath the window, there were several shapeless chairs and sofas, grouped around the wide hearth, and a rather battered piano. Everything about High Scarp spoke of a long history in the same clan: the once-elegant china that was stained and crazed with age; the black-and-white photographs on the walls; the antique radiators that were never more than lukewarm, despite the chill of the summer nights. The traditions of the place were clearly long-established too – the ancient walkers’ maps, and all the music in the village church that High Scarp visitors had contributed to over the years. We always, Fay kept saying. Bill liked the sense that they were part of a pattern.
He looked out of the window, letting his gaze roam over the hills and the serene blue of the sky above. A feeling he’d first noticed a day or two ago gathered in his belly: a tightness, a density, that might be pleasure or pain. He was filled with an inexplicable mixture of contentment and impatience – as though he wanted to prolong this moment, this weekend, forever, but also to seize what it held for him and devour it in a greedy rush. That landscape, he thought – that great empty space out there – was all his, just now. Everything was possible. Anything he might want.
That thought caused a lurch of uncertainty. Anything he might want. Was that really true? In his mind’s eye he saw the sheen of sweat on Judith’s neck, the sudden flash of her smile, and something else stirred in his memory. Buried deep beneath the rich silt of the last three years there was another image he had never quite forgotten. His first sight of Judith, that day in the chapel. Her fierce, see-if-I-care gaze, and the sense he’d had . . . No, it was impossible to be sure, now, what he’d thought or felt back then. It was impossible to untangle the threads of the years that had followed, the way their paths had all unfolded. But as his eyes swept down across the garden to the fells and the sky beyond, there was another lurch in his stomach. Marmion was standing on the lawn wrapped in a towel, staring out at the same view as him, with her head lifted to the early-morning sunshine.
*
Gazing out at the valley, Marmion wondered whether you’d ever get used to this scenery if you lived up here: to living among hills rather than people. This valley must be almost the same size as her corner of London, the densely packed streets between Crouch End and Archway, and there seemed to be absolutely no one else in it this morning.
But as she scanned the distant fells for the moving dots of walkers she caught a glimpse of someone much closer at hand, down in the lower part of the garden. Not exactly hiding, but – lurking, she thought. A hiker, perhaps, who had strayed in through the gate? But as she watched, the figure moved, and she saw that it was Fay. Unmistakably Fay, who had every right to lurk in her own garden, of course, but even so Marmion felt a flicker of unease. Something about Fay’s stance, the way she lifted her hands now to cover her eyes, seemed odd. Had Fay seen her? Was she all right? For a moment longer Marmion hesitated, then she pulled the towels more tightly around her and hurried on towards the cabin with the disconcerting sense that she’d been caught spying.
She dressed quickly, impatient now to be with the others again. When she came into the house, Fay was standing in the hall beside the phone.
‘Hello,’ Marmion said brightly. ‘What a beautiful morning.’
Fay smiled in an unfamiliar way: a little distant, as though she was disappointed by something. Had Fay seen her, then, out in the garden? Had she thought . . . Marmion felt a flush around her ears. She was being idiotic, surely; imagining things. But she was grateful when the others appeared, their noise and bustle filling the little gap of awkwardness.
‘This bacon looks delectable,’ Stephen was saying, and behind him Bill raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Ah! Is madam ready for her breakfast?’
Marmion mimed guilt. ‘I’m completely ravenous,’ she said. ‘I’ve been smelling it for the last half an hour. What marvellous people you are.’
And then, as they found their places around the table, there was a sudden moment of silence – the result of chance, not intention, Marmion thought, but even so it seemed to fall upon them like a gift. At home, this would have been the moment for the Quaker form of grace – a few minutes of quiet thankfulness – and she shut her eyes and reached for that sense of calm and sanctity she had been used to having within her grasp her whole life.
When she opened them again, she smiled at Fay across the table. It was too nice here to let shadows trouble her. But in the moment she held Fay’s gaze, it occurred to her to wonder what Fay might expect of them all after they graduated this summer, when what they’d offered her until now – a share in the closed world of the choir and their undergraduate life – was over. It occurred to her to wonder whether this trip was supposed to signal a reckoning of some kind.
September 2015
Stephen
Stephen Evans sat at his desk, sifting papers. He was conscious that his mind wasn’t entirely on the task in hand – a rare occurrence, but it didn’t much trouble him. There was time enough before Monday to address the few issues in this sheaf of documents that required some thought. He liked to have a teaser or two at the back of his mind: the mental equivalent of a chewing-gum habit, he thought. Certainly the question of alternative financing models for the Balkan consortium would be good fodder for motorway driving. He glanced at the clock, then shut his briefcase.
His PA looked up as he passed. ‘Off now?’ she asked. ‘Do you need me to print out the route for you?’
‘I know the way,’ he said. ‘From years ago.’
‘Fell-walking?’
‘A bit of singing, too.’ Stephen smiled briefly. ‘I’d prefer not to be called, this weekend.’
Jenny nodded, her eyes lingering on him for a moment before her attention returned to her computer.
Stephen had developed the habit of representing his past as a series of facts and anecdotes that he produced at apposite moments, like scout badges or souvenir pins. There was his adoption, his humble upbringing, his brother. There was his Cambridge education, and an occasional tantalising refe‑rence to his life as a choral scholar. There was the period in the Middle East, the immersion in Arabic and Islam and the upper echelons of society in the Gulf States; the MBA at Stanford and the spell in Silicon Valley; the dotcom years in India. The story was never spun out as a narrative whole: just the relevant credential, the apt reference, to advance his case or to throw an adversary off course, or simply to amuse. He was, people said, a likeable man – he knew that that was his reputation. In certain circles he was known as a competent tennis player, and as a jazz enthusiast who still, very occasionally, played the trumpet in a pick-up band. He knew he mystified people, though. He didn’t set out to be a puzzle, but neither did he trouble to explain himself. Not for him the profile in the weekend broadsheet or the financial press: never the spinning out of a drink in a hotel bar into confessional territory.
These days, what perplexed people most was that he showed so little interest in the trappings of achievement, and that he had never repeated the early, unsuccessful experiment in matrimony. There was a modest-sized flat in a far-from-modest building in Kensington, but no manorial pile in the Cotswolds nor chalet in Verbier. There was a nice car, but only one. He was regarded as an ascetic, and he was happy to endorse that impression. It was true that his emotional life was carefully controlled, his passions most likely to find expression in an overhead smash or a jazz riff. Or in the boardroom, of course. The thrill of drawing together the threads of a deal, or getting to grips with a new market, never palled.
He told himself it was a logical choice he’d made; that putting his professional life first accounted for the sparseness of his personal life, and that he was happy to pay that price. But it wasn’t that simple, of course. It was neither entirely true that he was an ascetic, nor entirely true that he’d made a choice. Circumstances, timing, context – those things weren’t all within his control. The cards had fallen in certain ways: everyone could say that, presumably. He had lived for so long in the Middle East that self-discipline had become a virtue, but it had always come easily to him. He’d always liked his own company.
He was glad, though, that the matrimonial experiment had taken place. Suky was still important to him. He hadn’t been rich when they were married, but he’d been generous afterwards, and she’d been grateful. She had a husband and a child now, and a flourishing psychotherapeutic practice, but she repaid his liberality – and his affection – by finding time for him when he asked. A civilised arrangement, Stephen thought, as he collected his car from the underground garage and pointed it towards Regent Street, and thence the west. Suky was by no means the least of the reasons he was glad to be back in London for the time being. He was sorry that she’d been on holiday for the last few weeks, so that he hadn’t been able to talk to her about this High Scarp business. Should I go? he might have asked her. Is it the right thing to do?
Suky knew most of the narrative that filled the gaps between the scout badges: she would have advised, inferred – understood. Though not everything. Not the close bonds, back in Cambridge, and the intensity of it all. No, certainly not everything.
He’d left the office early enough to be ahead of the rush hour, but even so the queues heading out of London were heavy. Unfazed, Stephen studied the imposing Victorian façades along the Marylebone Road. Another thing people might find surprising, he thought, was his patience in the face of wasted time – or what many of his colleagues would see as wasted time. Perhaps it was all those years living in places where time operated in a different fashion to the what’s-next English-speaking culture; where there was a more graceful, a more ritualistic rhythm even to business life. Certainly he’d lived in many cities where the traffic was worse than London, and he hadn’t been back long enough yet to be inured to the capital’s charms. Crawling towards the Westway, he counted up the years. It was well over a decade since he’d spent more than a month in the UK. The next thought came unbidden: his mother had still been alive then, and now even his brother was dead. Robert had hardly been a bulwark, of course, but he had been an anchor, something to tie him to England.
Stephen caught a strain, then, of an emotion that had haunted him recently: a yearning he hadn’t felt in all those years abroad. It was more complicated, being home. It raised expectations, exposed illusions. He’d made a virtue of fitting in where he didn’t belong, all over the world, but being back here begged questions he’d rather have avoided. Was this home – England, London, the penthouse flat that had sat empty for so long that it looked more like a rented pied-à-terre than a welcoming hearth? Where did he belong, after all?
He wondered, as the traffic accelerated at last, whether he was going to High Scarp in search of answers. One particular question still lurked in his mind, of course – but there were others, too. Did he imagine the weekend would satisfy a curiosity he hardly knew he had? Did he really think he’d have more in common with his long-ago friends than with the sharp-eyed divorcees who roped him into mixed doubles, or the dyed-in-the-wool City types who filled London’s boardrooms? Three years of singing Howells and Tallis together, peppering their conversation with lines from the psalms, seemed a flimsy basis for intimacy, two decades later, with people whose lives he knew nothing of, and from whom he’d parted in such uncomfortable circumstances.
Shielding his eyes against a shaft of late-afternoon sun, Stephen frowned. It was unlike him to be susceptible to sentiment, he thought. He was usually more suspicious, more scrupulous about his motives. Was it a mistake, this trip?
Well, he was going, anyway. Driving all that way on a Friday evening. Let it be a pilgrimage, an hommage to the past, and let the sacrifice of time and effort be part of it. He could have taken a train or a plane, coul
d have hired a chauffeur or even a helicopter, but if he was going, he was going under his own steam. He liked the idea of arriving late, by moonlight: he remembered how wonderful the stars had been up there.
June 1995
Marmion
The little church felt cool and hushed after the open spaces of the fells. They had it to themselves this morning: they’d been allocated two hours of rehearsal time to get used to the acoustic and finalise their programme before the opening concert of the music festival tonight.
‘Ha!’ Bill sang out, as he walked up the aisle; and then, as the echo died away: ‘Nice acoustic. Good solid walls.’
The others followed, laughing at some quip of Judith’s, their voices rising like bursting bubbles through the still air. It was odd, Marmion thought – endearing, but strange to her – that their first reaction when they came into a quiet space was always to make a noise. To fill it with themselves, rather than letting it fill them.
Far above, the roof was braced by thick rafters, and near the door hung two large banners made by local schoolchildren. She liked this church, Marmion thought. Liked it better than city churches with their gilt and incense. She felt a hum of pleasure in her chest as she caught up with her friends, her footsteps soft on the old stone.
The five of them arranged themselves in a semicircle below the altar rail. Judith, Cressy, Marmion, Bill, Stephen: sop, sop, alto, tenor, bass.
‘Byrd first, or Bruckner?’ Bill squatted in front of the box he’d carried down from the cottage, humming as he sorted the music into piles. He’d been singing this repertoire longer than any of them, having started at the age of eight as a chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, and he still slipped across to the treble part from time to time, soaring up to enjoy the top notes in his piercing falsetto.
Every Secret Thing Page 2
