Stephen wasn’t much given to spontaneous emotion, but a surge of affection rose inside him now. Idly (although his thoughts were never entirely idle) he pursued it, wondering what it meant, and whether it might illuminate his strange ambivalence about the past and the future. St Anne’s and the choir and these friendships had given him a platform to jump off from, he thought. Crossing the globe, starting a new life in the Middle East, felt possible because he’d done something almost as extraordinary already, and he was grateful for that. Certainly that was part of what he felt: part of the rush of contentment and regret that swirled in his chest, infused with the smell of warm grass and the distant calls of lambs.
But it was also, he thought, that the whole experience of Cambridge had coalesced this weekend, distilled to a kind of pure essence that could never be matched or followed – so that at the very moment when he understood how much he’d liked it, being part of the choir and this little group, he knew the time had come to leave them behind.
*
‘Anyone fancy a paddle?’ asked Judith. ‘Or are we going on?’
She looked at Fay, but Fay shook her head. ‘Whatever you like,’ she said. ‘On or back or stay here.’
Marmion shut her eyes. Her bottom ached from sitting so long on the cold stone, but nothing would induce her to move until Bill did. She heard Judith persuading Cressida to come and paddle with her, and Fay questioning Stephen about his plans, and she imagined the two of them – her and Bill – floating upwards, in the heat of the afternoon, like the couple in that Chagall painting, deep into the blue sky with a goat or something playing the cello.
It felt, she thought, as though something important was passing between them: the summed-up memory of the last few days, and the last few years. Singing and cycling and lectures and late nights and love. Definitely love, rising through her mind now on a faint thread of birdsong. Not a blackbird this time, but the tiny speck of a skylark, clear and sweet and effusive. Her mind followed it, shifting through shades of green and blue and golden yellow into a future where things were different, indefinably different but always the same, a landscape seen from above, from a soaring height among the birds and the sun . . .
And then it seemed to her that she’d been asleep, and that years might have passed, and she opened her eyes in a rush and saw the others packing up the picnic.
‘Come on, old thing,’ said Bill. ‘Time to get going.’
September 2015
Cressida
Mary-Lou was still standing on the doorstep: her face appeared again, looking doubtfully at her sister-in-law, when Cressida slammed the car boot down.
‘Sure you know the way?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Cressida. ‘Thank you.’
Staying the night with her eldest brother and his wife had been a mistake, she admitted. Apart from the irritation of being treated like a decrepit aunt when she was exactly the same age as Mary-Lou, she could ill afford the time. Quite honestly, this weekend couldn’t have come at a worse moment, with the book still not finished and the deadline receding behind her. She smiled in a way she knew would look tetchy. ‘Thank you for having me,’ she said.
‘It was great to see you,’ said Mary-Lou, the remains of her New York accent clearly discernible beneath the overlay of smart Cheshire housewife. ‘I’m so glad it worked out.’
It was a mystery to Cressida that Mary-Lou was so content in this prosperous backwater where Nicholas’s work had landed them ten years before, but contentment seemed to be bred into her, along with the production of fine strapping sons. Four of them, all being educated at boarding school. Cressida couldn’t begin to compute the expense.
Mary-Lou waved as the car turned noisily on the gravel, and Cressida felt a guilty sense of relief. She had tried hard to like her sisters-in-law. She’d looked forward to forming an alliance with them against the masculine hegemony of the family, in which her mother had always been a kind of totem, the ornamental figurehead of the good ship Benham, rather than a balancing power. But the three of them – recruited from the far corners of the globe, so that one might have expected more variety – had, it seemed to Cressida, simply absorbed her brothers’ points of view, rather than moderating their outlook in any way. Certainly their outlook on Cressida, who found it considerably more galling to be patronised by her sisters-in-law than her brothers, whose teasing was at least rooted in a well-concealed, but equally well-understood, respect for her brain.
Mary-Lou meant well, Cressida thought now, as she turned onto the main road, but the polite questions about her work enraged her; the implication that it was an eccentric hobby on a par with Mary-Lou’s charitable activities. It made Cressida feel that her life was a flimsy thing, her successes ephemeral curiosities. And it was worse just now, with the book at such a delicate stage. She had nightmares in which she hunted desperately for the lost thread of it, a glinting silver thing that was snatched away whenever she spotted it. Ridiculous, of course, when she had so many reams of notes, but it was always like this near the end. The finished article seemed more and more unattainable the closer you got, the passion and energy that had launched it fading memories.
Would she be able to recover them? she wondered. Would they rise again, bringing to light a new seam of work to carry her through the next few years? Sometimes she thought a career in academia was the very worst thing for anyone who really cared about literature. She was like someone intent on revealing the sleight of hand behind a magician’s act, destroying the magic for the sake of advancing an obscure vein of knowledge. Was it Billy Collins who wrote about critics bludgeoning poetry to death? He certainly knew a thing or two.
She stopped for petrol before the motorway, then slid carefully back into her seat, adjusting the lie of her new dress to prevent the seat belt crushing the expensive fabric. She’d put it on this morning so Mary-Lou could have the benefit of it too, but she should have guessed it would crease the moment she got into the car. It was absurd to have spent so much time and money on her wardrobe for this weekend, but she’d been determined to look her best: not a frumpy forty-something academic but a successful woman whose appearance spoke of a rich and vibrant life. At least as rich and vibrant as theirs.
Judith hadn’t married or had children; she’d discovered that with a bit of devious sleuthing. She didn’t know about the others, but it was Judith she compared herself to. She wondered whether Judith had wanted children; how things had unfolded for her. A shadow of guilt still lurked in Cressida’s mind – but it wasn’t for her to feel guilty, she told herself. Certainly not about Judith. And Judith, surely, had picked herself up and got on with her life without a backward glance. Cressida clicked on the CD player, and the car filled with the reassuring voluptuousness of Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
When Michael had finally slipped out of her grasp last year – and she could admit now that that was how it had been – she had wasted six months feeling sorry for herself, and furious with herself, and cursing men to hell. What amazed her, looking back on the seventeen years she had spent with him, was how consistently and how sustainedly she had deceived herself. About his attractions, she meant, as well as his intentions.
He’d been reasonably prepossessing at thirty-nine, when she’d first met him, recently returned from a stint at Harvard – and it was partly his influence that had got her a junior research fellowship, or so he’d led her to believe. It was easy to explain how she’d fallen into an affair with him then, flattered at being a desirable alternative to his beautiful, boring wife: even the challenge to her own morality, the flagrant disregard for her principles, had been part of the deliciously self-torturing cocktail. It was easy to see why she’d hung on to a no-strings, open-secret relationship while she was battling her way up through the groves of misogyny that were the Cambridge English Faculty. But why he still had such a firm hold on her when her career was established, and his once-audacious critical perspective was being laughed at, was inexplicable. Sometime between point
A and point B she could have, should have, looked at him with open eyes and seen that he’d become a canker. A man approaching sixty with three grown-up children and a wife who was still beautiful and serene while his childless mistress began to fade towards middle age.
Even now she could taste the bile – these last few months especially, after that far-fetched episode in May Week had nearly unseated her again – but she was all right, she told herself. She mustn’t flatter Michael with any more of her time or thought, especially not this weekend. She mustn’t dwell on the past in any of its incarnations, in fact. And she wouldn’t think about the book, either, for the next forty-eight hours. The university press could wait that long. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel in a tattoo of determination.
*
She stopped, as she’d planned, at Blackwell, an early-twentieth-century villa overlooking Lake Windermere. The visit did much to restore her peace of mind: the house itself, white and many-gabled, with a grey slate roof and phenomenal views, the interior’s Arts and Crafts treasures and the tea room’s home-made scones – even the shop, full of things Cressida would have liked to buy. All of it fed an inner spring of aesthetic pleasure that made her feel she could face the weekend with reasonable equanimity.
She got back into the car as the light started to fade. Good: she’d be at High Scarp by seven, as she’d planned. Everything was under control. She drove through Windermere and past Troutbeck church, remembering its wonderful Pre-Raphaelite window – and then she rounded the corner and saw a car in the middle of the road.
‘Shit!’
She braked hard, but the Corsa skidded to a halt just too late to avoid a slow-motion collision.
‘Shit!’ she said again, more vehemently. What the hell was someone doing stopping in the middle of a country road? How on earth was she supposed to see them in time?
A man was getting out of the other car now, a tall man who still had some of the lankiness of youth, although his hair was almost entirely white. Cressida stared, her heart beating furiously, the shock of the collision compounded by other emotions she didn’t have time to resist. Of course it made sense for him to be on the same road, but . . . It wasn’t just seeing him, she thought, but seeing him so different and at the same time instantly recognisable.
He was gesturing now, trying to explain why he’d stopped. Looking straight at her, but quite clearly not recognising her. Cressida felt a jolt of offence. Well, women did change more, of course. She’d cut her hair shorter, tried to keep the same colour, but perhaps . . . She undid her seat belt, clicked open the car door and climbed out into the road. The man’s expression didn’t change. Fury and disappointment welled up before she could stop them.
‘Bloody hell, Stephen,’ she said. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
He stared at her: a pleasing transformation.
‘Cressida?’ he said. ‘My goodness. I wouldn’t have . . . You don’t look old enough.’
Cressida considered this for a moment, wavering between anger and mollification. It was clearly a lie, but she had to give him credit for quick thinking.
‘Balls,’ she said. ‘But I’m glad to have run into you first. Literally.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Stephen said. ‘There were sheep in the road. I’ll pay for any damage.’
‘It doesn’t look as though there is any, luckily.’ His car, she noticed now, was a Jaguar. It would have been a bad start to have smashed up the back of it.
Stephen smiled. ‘It’s good to see you, Cressida,’ he said. ‘You look terrific.’
‘I don’t,’ she said, glancing down at the floral linen she could see now was ludicrous for a weekend in the Lake District. ‘I look ancient and exhausted, but I’m glad to see you too. It’s been much too long.’
She came forward and let him hug her – an awkward business, but they managed it with some dignity. For a fraction of a second Cressida shut her eyes, imagining them both young again; remembering the tender, painful saga of yearning and hope and disillusionment. But she wasn’t young any more. Surely there were advantages to that.
‘We ought to move,’ Stephen said, ‘or someone else will come round that corner and run into us. Are you OK to drive?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘I’ll see you there, then.’
Damn, Cressida thought, as she got back into her car. Damn, damn, damn. There’d been something horribly like amusement in his face before he turned away, as though she really hadn’t changed at all since she was a precocious undergraduate. All that time on the motorway: she could have dreamt up some amusing entrées, some clever, self-deprecating one-liners. What was the use of a first-rate mind if she had nothing to say for herself? Damn and blast.
For a few minutes she kept close behind the elegant rear of the Jaguar, but as they climbed towards the Kirkstone Pass, she slowed. There was too little time left, now, to prepare herself, and she’d only just understood how much she needed to prepare. And then, as she reached the top of the pass, there was Nag’s Pike in plain view, and the past laid out before her.
Part II
June 1995
Cressida
It was the concert, Cressida thought, that had whipped her emotions to such a pitch that she’d felt, for the first time, that it might be possible to act on them – but it was the walk the next day, picnicking above the lake and talking about the future in that delicious, indolent way as they all lay about on the mossy turf, that had stirred her courage. It had occurred to her then that the test she faced was about more than Stephen. It was all bound up with the way she thought about things, and the way she might live: with the great disjunction between mind and body. Between art and reality. As she’d shut her eyes and felt the sun on her hair and the flutter of a breeze on her face, it had seemed suddenly overwhelmingly important to act on her desires – to take responsibility for making sure the things that mattered to her came to something.
That evening there was a service of compline at nine thirty, just as the sun was setting. The church was filled with candles, and a draught of incense added to the enchantment of the ritual. Keep me as the apple of an eye, they sang, with a wonderful medieval curlicue on the last word. Hide me under the shadow of thy wings. They knelt and stood and sat together, candlelight trembling on their faces, then emerged to the pale dazzle of stars above the dark valley. As they walked back up the hill everyone was unusually quiet, and Cressida had a sense that something had altered – not just between her and Stephen, but for all of them.
‘Drink?’ asked Fay, when they got home.
She looked tired, Cressida thought; she wouldn’t want the evening to drag on too long. Cressida was glad of that. She could feel a restlessness in the air that seemed, again, to extend to the others too, although her head was so full of Stephen, of the portents laid out for them, that it was hard to see anything else clearly. She took a glass of whisky and felt it burn a path down inside her. From her tongue to her heart, she thought. From her heart to her tongue. She chose a space next to Stephen on the sofa, and their weight tipped them towards each other on the ancient springs, but she held herself upright, her body taut with anticipation.
Everyone was in bed before midnight. Cressida listened to the sound of footsteps passing to and from the bathroom, the opening and shutting of doors and the flux of water in the pipes. Her window was open, and she could hear an owl at the bottom of the garden and an occasional sharp crack that might be a fox or a badger in the undergrowth. At last the human sounds stopped, and she found she was holding her breath, lying so still that she wondered whether her limbs would move when she asked them to. She must go now, before Stephen fell asleep. Just another second to recall the warmth of his body beside her on the sofa, and the way he’d smiled at her across the church. Just another second to summon the last drop of fire from the whisky.
Stephen’s room was opposite hers. Cressida’s heart jumped as she nudged the door ajar. No light; no sound. God, what was she doing? The
words she’d prepared drained away. Then there was a rustle of sheets, and Stephen was looking at her.
‘Cressida?’
‘It’s such a beautiful night,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
He sat up. She couldn’t read his expression in the dark. Oh God, oh God. Apologies were mustering now, but before she could speak again he was pushing back the covers.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he suggested. ‘Up to the cave? We could take the rest of the whisky.’
*
It was warmer than Cressida had expected, and lighter, too. A quarter-moon had risen high above the fells, and the night was clear and still. As they climbed, sheep raised their heads to stare at them. At one point Cressida stumbled, and Stephen caught her arm to steady her.
‘All right?’ he asked, and she nodded, willing him not to let go. But the path was too narrow to walk side by side, and after a moment he dropped back behind her.
Fay had brought them up to the cave on the first day – the dragon’s cave, she’d called it. Ull the dragon, after whom Ullswater had been named. Marmion had repeated the story to the couple who ran the village shop, asking if they sold postcards with Ull on them, and they’d looked mystified – then Fay had laughed and said it wasn’t a proper legend, just a story her father had told her when she was little. Marmion had looked crestfallen, and Cressida had bought her some Kendal mint cake, glad it wasn’t her who’d asked the question.
Tonight they heard the rush of water first. A little stream ran down the fell and disappeared into the mouth of the cave, its splash and tumble echoing back up to the surface. Stephen and Cressida stood before it, the darkness inside seeming to gather up the night and offer it back to them with the damp chill of its rocky walls.
‘Careful,’ Stephen said, as Cressida took a step closer. ‘It’s very slippery. Shall we go on up to the bench?’
‘No.’ It wasn’t far, the Victorian bench perched on a rise from which – at least during the day – the lake could be seen in one direction and the village in the other, but it wasn’t the climb that put Cressida off. The bench was too public, she thought; too formal. ‘No, let’s . . . Up there, look. We can sit there.’
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