Although they’d both grown up steeped in music, Bill was in many ways an unlikely partner for her, Marmion thought. He was handsome, in a boyish, twinkly, teasing way, as well as being the choir’s star tenor: she still couldn’t quite believe that he’d chosen her rather than Judith or Cressida or any other girl in the world. His sense of humour still surprised her sometimes – that flippancy that was unexpected in someone who was otherwise kind and reliable and serious-minded. But it was good for her, she knew, to have fun poked at her. It gave her a little thrill of pleasure and possession, making her think of the other things they shared. Things she probably shouldn’t think about in a church.
‘Which Bruckner?’ asked Judith. ‘ “Locus iste”, I suppose?’
‘That seems pretty apt,’ said Stephen. ‘This place was made by God.’
‘An inestimable mystery, beyond reproach,’ said Bill. ‘Just like you, Judith. But God is fairly central to our repertoire, I fear.’
‘I don’t object to God,’ said Judith. ‘I like his music, anyway.’
‘Good-oh.’ Bill grinned in his characteristic way, as though he could barely suppress his high spirits. ‘Ah, but maybe something else to kick off with . . .’
Judith and God was a running gag. Of all the places for her to end up, she often said, a Christian choir was the last you’d expect for the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Hindu father. A chapel choir was a strange place for a Quaker, too, but Marmion was used to the idea that music got everywhere in life. Early on she’d tried to probe Judith about the traditions she’d grown up with, and how her parents had reconciled their beliefs, but Judith had laughed. ‘Medicine is what my parents have in common,’ she’d said: ‘medicine and me. The rest of it doesn’t worry them.’
Not much seemed to worry Judith, either. She was blessed with apparently unassailable self-confidence and quite enough brains and beauty to live up to it. Hybrid vigour was another of her favourite phrases: Marmion, who’d been brought up to value diversity, was awed by the richness of Judith’s cultural heritage. She had relatives in Tel Aviv and Delhi, and she talked about her travels in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as though they were no more exotic than the Hayters’ family holidays on the Isle of Wight. If the absence of God from Judith’s life didn’t trouble her, Marmion thought, it was perhaps because the promise of this life was plenty to be going on with. She would make a wonderful lawyer, with her quick wits and her feisty determination. But she was also generous with her time and her vivacity, and when she paid attention to you it felt like a blessing.
That made things harder for Cressida, Marmion thought now, as Bill handed round the first sheaf of music. There were several sides to Cressy, not all of them easy to live with. There was Cressy the private-school girl, who understood a certain order of things – moral and intellectual as well as social – and held fast to it. There was Cressy the girlish waif, sweetly pretty and perfectly designed to encourage the protective instincts of men. Women often disliked that Cressida, although Marmion could already see that she had the kind of prettiness you needed to capitalise on before it faded, and that Judith’s looks would last much longer. And then there was Cressy the English student, astonishingly well read and deadly serious in her academic aspirations.
Marmion was studying for a degree in music – what else would the daughter of two professional musicians do, armed with a string of Grade 8 distinctions and a just-passable collection of A levels? – but Cressy’s knowledge of music as a cultural phenomenon, of the overlaps with literature and art and social history, was vastly greater than hers. She could ignite a spark of interest with a chance remark and follow it through with a dazzle of detail. When ‘The Lamb’ appeared on the service sheet at Advent, Cressy had talked, on the way over to chapel one evening, about how John Tavener’s twentieth-century spirituality related to William Blake’s, two hundred years ago. After that Marmion had sung ‘Little lamb, who made thee?’ with the pleasing sense that she’d grasped something complex and satisfying.
Cressida, of course, was staying on in Cambridge next year to do an MPhil, and looking at her now as she inspected the stained glass windows Marmion felt an unexpected pang of envy: a sudden sorrow for the changes ahead, the end of this carefree era. Had the rest of them ignored that fact as recklessly, as determinedly, as she had?
*
Staring up at the wonderful glass, Cressida was conscious of a familiar sense of surprise, even anguish, at the way everything was so compromised by the banality of life. Things like art and poetry, and the fine threads of emotion you could draw from them, ought to illuminate human existence – but it was so hard to find any objective correlative, in real life, for the purity of feeling that art and poetry inspired. Not that she meant – oh, human feelings were real enough, and strong enough, of course. Not just hers: she didn’t need her friends to rhapsodise over a rock or a tree, or even a stained glass window, to prove that they felt things deeply.
No, it was more the pattern of things: wanting to believe that there was some pattern, some point, to the great billowings of passion that art inspired. Poetry didn’t require love to be requited, of course, but it led you to believe there was some purpose to it; some lesson to draw, or higher plane to perceive. There was a terrible amount of waste in human life, in Cressida’s view. Wasted emotion. Wasted suffering that had no benefit, no rationale.
She was thinking, of course – she hated to be so blunt, even in her private mind – of Stephen: of her and Stephen.
With only the five of them singing, she and Stephen would be close enough to touch all weekend, a fact which both delighted and tortured her. Not that it was simply . . . It was impossible to tease out the physical from the intellectual, she thought. Stephen’s awkward, mobile face, with that long nose and high cheekbones, but also the light that came into his eyes sometimes when he spoke – and the things he said, cleverer and more tantalising than any of the others. The way his body was a secondary thing, a container for his mind, but also gave him pleasure – and her, too. Taking her breathlessly by surprise by running up a hill, or cocking a cigarette from a packet with such careless grace. Smoking at all, when he was otherwise so measured, so controlled.
Oh, there was plenty of objective correlative for her infatuation (a painful word, but she insisted on it). There had never been another man to match him, despite all her efforts to divert her affections. But what was the point of it? And what, more troublingly, was the point of his resistance? Was it resistance, or simply ignorance, or reticence, or uncertainty? What would happen if she seized her courage and . . .?
Being up here, away from the place where they’d been familiar friends, might help him to see things differently, Cressida thought – as might the sense that there was an open door ahead. Men his age preferred to have an escape route clearly in view, she knew that, and she didn’t mind. It was the intensity of intimacy she craved. She didn’t want to possess Stephen in the way Marmion possessed Bill. She could see how dulling constancy might be – and even if there was a niggle of self-deception in that thought, she certainly understood quite clearly that continuity was a different matter, an entirely different matter, from the sublime moment. She understood, for example, that the continuity of Marmion and Bill’s relationship was a different matter for each of them.
She looked at Marmion now, a smile on her round, open-featured face. Had Marmion seen the way Bill looked at Judith sometimes? she wondered. Was her childlike belief in happy-ever-after justified, or did her serenity derive from a higher, a more reliable, source than that?
*
‘Are you with us, Marmion?’ asked Bill.
‘Sorry.’ Marmion smiled, dragging her attention back to the moment. ‘What are we starting with?’
Bill skipped across to the piano and played a sequence of four notes. Marmion recognised the opening phrase of the Walford Davies setting of Psalm 121.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s a good way to begin.’
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help.
The chant was simple, filled with a joyous assurance that always felt like a salve to the soul. Their voices resonated together, five parts moulding into a glowing whole. Marmion could feel the music washing through them and rising through dust and sunlight to the distant rafters, banishing the flutters of doubt that had assailed her earlier, the whispers of anxiety and self-consciousness.
My help cometh even from the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: and he that keepeth thee will not sleep.
Wonderful, Marmion thought, as they reached the last line and began on the Gloria. If there was any need to justify her affection for the Anglican liturgy, let it be because of the psalms, the pleasure of bringing this ancient poetry to life. Looking round at the faces of her friends, she thought that the thrill of singing with this group of people would never leave her. Making something together, she thought in a moment of startling clarity, in the same way as sex, and with the same effect of rendering you completely alive.
September 2015
Judith
Judith was keen on trains, not just for ecological reasons but because she found them – even the fraying, fetid variety that still ran on some lines – inexplicably exciting. And quick, if you were going a long way. Less than three hours from Euston to Oxenholme, and then a taxi at the other end to whisk her up to Griseley. Perfect. Let lesser mortals stew in the weekend traffic on the M6 while she sat in her window seat and enjoyed the view.
But even as the train pulled noiselessly out of the station, a glimmer of doubt began to filter through her jubilation. She’d focused on the practical arrangements, of course, in order to maintain a degree of ironic detachment about the purpose of this weekend. There was no getting round the fact that this was a very odd thing to be doing: going to meet her closest friends from university – none of whom she’d seen for donkey’s years – because the older woman who’d taken an interest in them all twenty years ago had left her house in the Lake District to them in her will. And left it wrapped in a complicated legal bow whose details were to be revealed, in suitably melodramatic fashion, when they had all gathered in the house again. However you looked at it, this wasn’t exactly a weekend mini-break without strings.
As the outskirts of London swept past, Judith pondered. Her view of the past was shrouded by something rather more heavy-duty than ironic detachment, but she prided herself on her ability to see almost anything clearly when she put her mind to it. Start with Fay, then. It was because of Fay that she was on this train, after all.
Fay had known there were good reasons why they’d all lost touch. Indisputable reasons. Was it really possible that she’d had no one else to leave High Scarp to? No nieces or nephews; no other students she’d got to know in the decades since they’d left Cambridge? Were they supposed to feel guilty about neglecting her all this time? Judith hadn’t thought about that before – not that she’d thought about any of it more than she could help. Not at the time, when ploughing on with her life had seemed the only way forward, and not later, when Cambridge, Cumbria and the collective consciousness of the choir had been at a safer distance. Even Bill – she’d buried all that, as well as she could, and as for the rest . . .
She leant her head back against the seat, conjuring up Fay’s face, and that rather deep voice. Have you forgotten? Judith heard her say, with a twitch of a smile. Have you forgiven yourselves?
Was it fanciful to imagine Fay as a kind of Svengali figure? To recall a sinister shadow about her? She’d been generous almost to the point of embarrassment, for the three years they’d known her, with barely a hint of expectation to accompany her largesse. But there had been twinges of discomfort that last summer, Judith remembered. Moments when things hadn’t made sense, or the familiar order had felt unsettled. Had she read too much into them, then, or too little? And what on earth might Fay have in store for them all at High Scarp this weekend?
Them. The them she hadn’t considered properly for years. That was the real thing, of course.
She was curious, Judith admitted. Almost ghoulishly curious, now, to see what they’d be like, and what they’d make of each other. She’d done a bit of ferreting, but only half-heartedly. The things she really wanted to know, really dreaded finding out, were impossible to discover on the Internet.
‘Hello, Judith,’ said someone.
Judith turned to find a man smiling at her from the aisle. For a wild moment she thought it might be Bill, swimming out of her thoughts and into fleshly form, but only for a moment.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘It is Judith, isn’t it? Judith Malik?’
‘Absolutely.’ She smiled, half her mind still elsewhere. She couldn’t remember his name, this man, but she had a fair idea where she’d seen him before. A conference hotel near Peterborough, about a year ago. ‘How are you? Off for the weekend somewhere?’
‘I live in Preston,’ he said.
‘Oh, right.’
‘Are you heading that way?’ His smile was more hopeful than she liked.
‘The Lakes,’ said Judith. ‘Staying with friends.’
The woman opposite was following this exchange with an active attention which was presumably justified by the sign on the window that read: Quiet Carriage. Seeing a way out, Judith nodded at it with a shrugging, regretful smile.
‘I’m off to the buffet car,’ he said.
Judith nodded again; and then, to make it clear that she had no need of the buffet car, she opened the lurid bottle of juice she’d bought in Pret at Euston and took a tentative sip.
With a final wistful smile, the man ambled off, leaving Judith conscious of a blush about her cheekbones. The juice was disgusting. She stuffed it back into her briefcase. This wasn’t the weekend for purgatorial health fads – nor, indeed, for additional complications of any kind. Damn the interfering tentacles of coincidence.
The irony was that Preston Man was the only indiscretion she’d had for years. But getting by, as she did, on a somewhat unorthodox set of arrangements, the odd dash of novelty was tempting. She wasn’t old enough yet for such things to be undignified, she told herself, and she wasn’t answerable to anything beyond her own liberal sense of propriety. She held fast to that mantra, despite the occasional flashes of a morality more conventional than she liked to accord herself; the occasional glimpses of a life in which she was safely tucked up with the same man every night.
Instead she had two men, neither of them exactly safe and each with a wife of his own to be tucked up with at night. Arvind was a colleague – a member of her chambers, several years her junior – and Jonty had been a client. That was the risqué part; that and the wives. But both had their merits as bed-mates and companions, and Judith had known all along what the score was with each. It might look as though she’d drawn two short straws, but it suited her not to be properly spoken for: if she needed proof of the satisfactoriness of her sex life, surely it was that Preston Man and his ilk were a rare diversion. But it was unsettling, even so, to have them appearing unsummoned from the ether, especially just now. It seemed to raise questions, to draw attention to things that would be better kept submerged this weekend.
Judith sighed. God, three hours was a long time to spend on a train, especially one that leant and weaved like this so you couldn’t forget you were hurtling towards a destination you’d tried hard to forget. Staring out of the window at a cine roll of twenty-first-century Britain, she told herself that she wasn’t going to let the past ambush her. She was neither victim nor transgressor, and she wasn’t in thrall to anyone. Not even to herself.
June 1995
Marmion
Fay had laid out lunch on the terrace when they got back from the church: plates of cheese and cold meat, jars of pickle, a basket of bread and two bowls of salad. She’d always been
the master of effortless catering, Marmion thought. All those meals – the summer picnics and winter stews and set-piece fondues, with molten cheese drawn out in strings across the table and candles flickering among the bowls of roses. All those happy times Fay had given them.
‘Thou shalt prepare a table before me,’ said Bill. ‘We shall all be fat upon earth indeed.’
Fay smiled. ‘How was St Cuthbert’s?’
‘We liked the windows,’ said Cressida.
Marmion grinned. Cressida had explained the stained glass to them after the rehearsal: the three windows designed by a local artist which showed Christ preaching in the valley, blessing the flock, baptising in the lake. Marmion felt a Quakerly squirm of discomfort about iconography, but these images were heartfelt, designed to show God among ordinary people, not to scare them with His grandeur. Although up here, stained glass was hardly necessary. The fells spoke for God, in her view.
For an hour or so they all sat around the wooden table, amusing each other with anecdote and reflection and teasing, watched benignly by Fay. The shadows of the morning seemed now like a figment of Marmion’s imagination. Bill sat opposite her, and Marmion basked in the knowledge that she could lift her eyes to his face any time she wanted; that he was just there, just a few feet away. As were the others, of course. It had always been hard to disentangle the specific, sharp joy of her relationship with Bill from the pleasure of the group and their shared friendship. Part of knowing Bill so well was seeing him in different contexts: not just alone but in the choir, among their friends, and even, a couple of times, at home.
Every Secret Thing Page 3
