Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

‘Such as?’

  Judith made an impatient gesture, then countered it with a quick smile. She looked tense, Stephen thought. Not because of this conversation, he guessed. He remembered that log, burning brightly at five o’clock this morning.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said. ‘Practically anything’s possible.’

  ‘Charades, perhaps, as you said last night. Either in the literal sense or the figurative.’

  Judith pulled a face. ‘It’s very odd being back here,’ she said. ‘I found some old Scrabble scores in a drawer. Marmion’s name there among ours. It’s almost as though we’ve never left. As though Fay’s still here, calling the shots.’

  ‘Let’s hope for moderation, then.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Looking at Judith now, at her forced smile and the shadows under her eyes, Stephen had a sudden memory of their graduation day: of Bill standing a little apart from the throng and watching Judith, still in her wheelchair, laugh with false bravado at something someone had said. He’d wondered then what would come of that liaison. He’d wondered whether Bill and Judith were a better match than Bill and Marmion; imagined Judith awakening something more compelling in Bill. Was that fanciful? He’d certainly thought Bill might amount to more than a small-town solicitor – a fine thing to be if it made you happy, of course, but it didn’t seem to him that Bill was happy.

  But perhaps Marmion’s virtue was what Bill had needed, Stephen thought now. Perhaps it was her loss, rather than his failure to secure Judith, that had been the tragedy of his life. He’d certainly chosen a version of Marmion to marry. Had Judith noticed that? Had Bill, even? He felt a wave of pity, then, for Isabel, but also for Bill and for Judith. They’d been unlucky, he thought. Very unlucky.

  Judith was looking directly at him now, her gaze steady.

  ‘I’m sure Bill knows more about conditions precedent than I do,’ she said, giving the words a little more weight than they required, as if to conceal another conversation they might have been having. ‘There’s a chance we could set aside the will and arrange things differently – but that depends on how the rest of the estate is disposed.’

  ‘Meaning . . .?’

  A quick shake of the head. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Judith yawned ostentatiously. ‘God, I’d forgotten how awful the beds are here.’

  ‘I was thinking that might be our first act. Replacing them.’

  ‘Unless it’s prohibited, of course, by St Fay.’

  Stephen cocked his head and smiled at her. That was better: a glimpse of the old Judith. ‘Lucky we’ve got two lawyers among our number to help us find a way round any difficulties.’

  ‘Or ensure the finer points are observed.’ Judith grinned too, then turned her head sharply as a door opened somewhere in the house.

  Stephen stood up. ‘Shower for me, I think. Best foot forward for the solicitor. Then bacon and eggs?’

  ‘Sure.’ Judith got up too, as though she was anxious not to be left alone in the room. ‘What time is the wretched man –’

  But before she could finish the sentence, Isabel appeared in the doorway. She looked younger this morning, Stephen thought, her cheeks flushed with sleep like a child’s.

  ‘Good morning.’ Isabel’s eyes took in Stephen, then Judith, and Stephen felt Judith stiffen. Curious, he thought. He wondered whether Isabel knew what had happened between Bill and Judith that calamitous summer. And whether he was right about that burning log, too.

  ‘I thought I was first up,’ Isabel said. ‘Bill’s still fast asleep. I thought I’d make breakfast for everyone.’

  Judith’s hesitation was almost imperceptible.

  ‘I’ll help,’ she said.

  He ought to stay too, Stephen thought, but instead he found himself moving towards the door. After all, it was better to pretend to ignorance.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’

  June 1995

  Judith

  Back in Bristol, Judith submitted to a swaddle of fond parental care while the country submitted to a heatwave. The cast on her leg was horribly uncomfortable in this weather. Her nights were still filled with overwrought dreams, and she spent her days lying on a sofa, or on a sunbed in a shady corner of the garden, reading Mills and Boon novels and drinking chocolate milkshakes, dozing in front of daytime TV and waiting for news from High Scarp, or Cambridge, or wherever her friends had dispersed to.

  She’d assumed she’d go back to St Anne’s for graduation, but the more she thought about this plan the more doubts she had. The ceremony itself meant something to her, but that wasn’t really the point: for the five of them not to graduate together when they’d shared so much these last three years was a shame. The last week shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow everything else. But then . . . That conversation in her hospital room still haunted her. Did the others all hate her now? What had they said to Bill, and what had he said to Marmion?

  Oh, that thought tumbled her heart. But even so, even so, the strangest thing was that in this tangled web of emotion and conjecture, she could hardly identify her feelings for Bill. Was this, as she’d imagined in those few heady days at High Scarp, a grand passion – the love of a lifetime – so that long, long in the future the wrinkle of this summer, the curious detail of swapping partners within their little group of friends, would be recalled with mild ironic chagrin? Or was it a mad fling they’d soon regret, so that Marmion’s happiness had been ruined for nothing?

  Judith turned restlessly, painfully, on the sofa, her cotton skirt sticking to her skin and the hated plaster cast weighing her down. She longed for Bill, dreaded seeing him, wondered why he didn’t come. She read obsessively, distractedly, fretfully, living other lives while hers quivered nerveless in the summer heat.

  And then, one afternoon, the doorbell rang. Her parents were both at work, and Judith took a long time to answer the door, struggling through the house on her crutches.

  ‘Hello,’ said Bill, when she opened it. ‘Thank goodness. I was beginning to think this might be a wild goose chase.’

  ‘Bill,’ she said.

  He’d never been to her house before, but he was the sort of person, she understood, who had no difficulty with maps and timetables. Judith felt her limbs dissolve with the shock of realising that he wasn’t an abstract concept but a man of particularities, of flesh and imperfection, just now a little travel-rumpled and conspicuously anxious. And that no reasoning, no rationalising could account for the fact that she loved him.

  ‘I would have rung,’ he said, ‘but your number’s ex-directory.’

  A stream of questions presented themselves: how did he have her address and not her phone number? What had prompted him to come now, today? She gazed at him, counting the days that had passed, wondering what had been happening to him.

  ‘Shall I come in?’

  He followed her through the house to the terrace, where swallows circled over the suburban gardens.

  ‘How have you been?’ he asked, as she lowered herself onto her steamer chair and heaved her leg up.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Bored and hot. Reading trashy novels.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The last one was about a ship’s captain who falls in love with a flame-haired stowaway.’ She looked at him, wondering what all these words were for, how soon they could get past them.

  ‘There was a redhead on the train,’ said Bill. ‘And a rather smelly man with a dog, which the guard didn’t take kindly to.’ He stopped, and reached a hand tentatively towards her. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘It seems much longer than five days. Cambridge felt very odd without you.’

  ‘Have you been back there?’

  He nodded. There was a pause, across which neither of them could offer a bridge. His hand hovered, still, an inch or two from her knee. The smell of honeysuckle and jasmine – an Indian smell, her father called it – suffused the still air, and Judith felt as though she was holding her brea
th, stretching out a single moment into something that might, if she willed it hard enough, last for ever – the moment before they had to ask each other the questions that waited for them.

  ‘Tea?’ she offered.

  ‘No,’ said Bill.

  ‘Wine, then? Beer? We might have beer.’

  ‘To be honest, Judith . . .’

  His hand flitted up to her cheek, to her neck, to her shoulder. She watched his face soften and yield, and she felt herself giving way too, and then his mouth against hers and all defences gone. The throb in her leg seemed to swell and spread to fill her whole body with an intensity of feeling in which pleasure and pain were no longer different things but a great conflagration of guilt and desire and sharp, stinging happiness.

  ‘The bloody cast,’ she said, somewhere in the depths of his embrace. ‘I can’t move. We can’t . . .’

  ‘I’ll carry you,’ he said.

  She started to object, but then he was kissing her again, and she shut her eyes tight against the glare of the sun as he lifted her awkwardly in his arms, kicking over a glass from beside her chair that rolled away and smashed on the steps. No matter, she thought. Nothing mattered. Nothing but this moment, this banishing of words. This was what her life had been building towards: this was the beginning of everything.

  *

  ‘Tell me what’s been happening,’ she said.

  He didn’t answer at once. His eyes were shut; her fingers trailed over his chest as though to smooth something away. Somewhere nearby a lawnmower started up, breaking the hushed silence the heat had laid over the drowsy suburb.

  ‘They took you to Lancaster,’ he said eventually.

  Judith nodded: she hadn’t expected him to start there, but it was fine; anything was fine. All she really wanted was to hear his voice, to let him tell her things. Bill lifted himself onto one elbow so that she could see his face, and she felt a quiver run through her, an aftershock of contentment and agitation.

  ‘Stephen went with you in the helicopter.’ He hesitated. ‘It was terrible on that mountain, Judith. We didn’t know how badly hurt you were, and Marmion . . .’

  ‘I gathered.’

  ‘She was – very restrained. But everyone could see that you and I . . .’

  Judith nodded. ‘I remember Cressida, in the hospital,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ His lips tightened for a moment. ‘She’s been back in Cambridge.’

  ‘And Marmion?’

  ‘Marmion went home,’ Bill said.

  He tried to smile at her, but his face seemed to resist it.

  She wondered suddenly how long he would stay. Did he plan to go back to Cambridge tonight, or to Birmingham? Panic filled her: her parents would be home soon, and if he left then . . . Foolish, foolish, to let the afternoon slip away. Foolish to want to know what had been said, or what the others thought, when he was here with her, when they could be . . .

  She tried to move, to shift her body a little closer towards him. Perhaps it was the wrenching pain in her leg, or the flat way the sun caught his face just then, or the abrupt silencing of the lawnmower, leaving a weight of expectation in the air. But quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, came a shift of perspective. Quite suddenly it was as if they had been wallowing here in these rumpled sheets for weeks; as if they had walked deliberately and consciously into a cheap betrayal of wives and husbands and children. As if they had misconstrued everything. She remembered that first rehearsal in the chapel three years ago; the first time she’d met Bill. Some instinct had warned her off then, and she’d forgotten it, ignored it. Or had that just been fear – of the strength of her feelings, and perhaps of his?

  How could she know?

  ‘Bill,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘Not sure of what?’

  He looked surprised by her tone of voice but not worried, not at all worried yet.

  ‘This. Us. I’m not sure we should be doing this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘I love you, Judith. Everything will be all right.’

  His face looked strange now, at once wary and unguarded. Judith was conscious of her power to hurt them both, and she could feel conflicting urges doing battle inside her: to twist the cord further or to release it, laughing off this flutter of doubt and letting it drift away through the open window. Which way did her true, brave, noble feelings lie? There seemed to be nothing but mush in her head.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t think.’ His voice wavered a little. ‘You’ve been through an awful lot, Judith. Maybe I shouldn’t have come, just yet. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Has Cressida been in touch with you?’ he asked. ‘Is that what it is? Or – Marmion?’

  ‘No,’ said Judith. ‘No one. Just you. Just today.’

  ‘So what can possibly be wrong?’ He smiled then, lifting his hand to stroke her hair. ‘Please don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.’

  ‘What “everything”?’ Judith shut her eyes: she felt a little sick now.

  ‘Marmion. Cressida. Whatever it is you’re worried about.’

  ‘It’s not them.’ Judith couldn’t help herself: the words just came. ‘It’s us. I don’t think we should be doing this. It feels all wrong.’

  He said nothing for a moment. She could see she’d wounded him, and part of her was glad. Part of her wanted to drive him away, even though she knew that would hurt her as much as Bill.

  ‘Perhaps we need a little more time,’ he said eventually. He was scrabbling for a foothold, Judith thought, trying to prevent things slipping any further.

  ‘When’s graduation?’ she asked.

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Judith said. ‘My parents will bring me, and we can all be together. Then I think we shouldn’t see each other.’

  He was trembling – or was that the heat, shimmering like a mirage over them both?

  ‘You can’t mean that,’ he said. ‘You can’t just dismiss me like a –’

  ‘Like a what?’ She was a little bit mad, she could tell that, and part of her was terrified now, but another part was very calm, watching things unfold from somewhere outside her spinning head. ‘Like a what, Bill?’

  ‘I thought you felt something for me,’ he said. ‘I thought we were both . . .’

  And then it was as if a balloon deflated abruptly inside her. The pain in her leg was almost unbearable; she didn’t want to talk, to think, any more.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You said it yourself: we need some time.’

  ‘How long?’ he asked. How much time?

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not a – quarantine. Not a prescription. Just . . .’ He was still looking at her, and the expression in his eyes almost made her relent. But she was right; she was sure she was right. Reason came flooding in now to justify her. If their feelings were real, they would last. If they tried to make a go of it now, with all the complications of the last few weeks stacked against them, they might never know for sure. ‘Three months,’ she said. ‘The end of the summer. If you still . . . We’ll know what it means, then.’

  August 1995

  Stephen

  Stephen wasn’t entirely sure that this meeting was a good idea, but he made his way to the Northern Line platform at Waterloo buoyed up by a sense of purpose. It was weeks, now, since any of them had seen each other, and he’d kept thinking he ought to do this. Not quite restitution, but . . . Well, anyway, he would see what came of it. Three stops later he bounded up the escalator, and when he came through the ticket barrier and out into Oxford Street, Marmion was already waiting.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘You’re not. I’m early. I’m always either early or late. It’s very nice to see you, Stephen. It’s very nice of you to suggest this.’

  She still looked as drawn and as enervated as
she had in those last few days at High Scarp. His father had looked like that after his heart surgery last year, Stephen thought, but he’d bounced back since then. He looked better than ever, now.

  ‘I thought we’d go to Pizza Express,’ he said. ‘Is that OK?’

  When they were sitting down, Stephen smiled across the table. ‘You look very well. Have you been away?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t really, but I have been away. A couple of weeks on the beach.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Isle of Wight. But it felt like the South of France, this year. We got through gallons of suncream.’

  ‘Snap. We’ve just got back from Bournemouth.’

  They looked at each other for a few moments, then dropped their eyes at the same moment to the menu. He had nothing to feel guilty about, Stephen reminded himself. Nothing except a temptation to brush her under the carpet along with the rest of them, and he was here, wasn’t he, resisting that?

  ‘What do you fancy?’ he asked.

  ‘I always have the Veneziana. Ever since –’

  She stopped. Their first tour with the choir had been to Venice, two summers ago. Stephen remembered Marmion and Bill hand in hand, leaning over the side of a vaporetto, the sun catching their faces as it sank towards the lagoon.

  ‘I’ll have the same,’ he said. He turned to summon the waiter.

  When they’d placed their order, Stephen sat back in his chair. The truth was that he had absolutely no idea what to say. Were High Scarp and Cambridge and the others all off limits? Music, then? Her family?

  ‘What are your plans for the rest of the summer?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ Marmion said. ‘In a bookshop, covering someone’s maternity leave.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I quite enjoy it,’ Marmion said. ‘I think they thought – Cambridge graduate, must know about books. I haven’t confessed that I’m practically illiterate.’

  Stephen could see from her face how much the effort at joviality was costing her. ‘I’ve got a job too,’ he said. ‘At Gatwick.’

  ‘With your father?’

  ‘Not working with him, but he suggested it. I’m driving a shuttle bus.’