Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘Who are you after?’ She sounds friendly, efficient.

  Judith wants to put the phone down now, but something forces her on.

  ‘Bill Devenish,’ she says, ‘But –’

  ‘No, this is the right number.’ Judith can hear the quick smile, the chair being pushed back. ‘Hang on – he’s just here.’

  But Judith’s thumb has found the hang-up button now. As she sits with the phone in her hand, the dead silence around her, she can hear the woman’s voice still in her head: Someone for you, Bill, but we were cut off. I expect she’ll try again. Funny: she’d never imagined a wife for him. So he’s settled down, moved on. She’d never anticipated that.

  Part V

  September 2015

  Judith

  When the sitting room door had shut behind Stephen, Judith and Isabel looked at each other. She should have moved more quickly, Judith thought, claiming she too needed a shower, following Stephen down the corridor – but somehow she’d known, when Isabel came into the room, that she was going to stay. Not exactly as a penance, because there was really no reason to feel guilty about last night’s encounter by the fire. Nothing had happened. Nothing except words. And none of it was her fault. She’d done nothing to encourage Bill, and she certainly hadn’t seen his declaration coming: she might have imagined a frisson of nostalgic suggestion this weekend, but not . . .

  Isabel’s face gave nothing away, but some instinct told Judith that she knew something had changed; something was up. Had she heard Bill coming back to bed? Had he explained himself, made excuses, talked in his sleep? All these years she’d lived with the possibility of facing Arvind’s wife, she thought, or Jonty’s. There was less basis for jealousy in this case, but the stakes were higher, even so. She could admit that: the stakes had always been higher with Bill. And her sangfroid about Isabel – about her existence and her presence this weekend and her position vis-à-vis Judith herself – was less secure this morning.

  ‘We seem to be the catering team,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ Isabel gave a quick smile. ‘I don’t mind. I’m happy to be useful.’

  Perhaps she was wrong, Judith thought. There was no wariness in Isabel’s manner. ‘Shall we check out the provisions, then? Stephen fancied bacon and eggs.’

  There was plenty of bacon in the fridge, but no eggs. Odd, Judith thought.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Isabel. ‘Could we get some in the village?’

  It was ten to eight: the shop would probably open any minute. But Judith hesitated. Her mind felt disconcertingly maladroit this morning, struggling to settle on the right course.

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ she said.

  She’d imagined them walking down the hill, but as they came out of the house Isabel clicked the remote to unlock her car, and Judith was relieved, then, at the thought that the expedition would be shorter.

  Isabel backed gingerly out of the drive.

  ‘Steep,’ she said, and Judith nodded.

  They passed a couple of walkers, backpacked and booted, heading for the fell. Judith looked up through the windscreen: the sky was very grey, but the clouds were high still. She heard Fay’s voice suddenly: Rain’s always round the corner, up here. Not that it had been, that summer. She remembered day after day of sunshine.

  The village shop was open, but there were no eggs.

  ‘They’ll be here in half an hour,’ the woman said. ‘I’m sorry: we sold out last night, and we’re waiting for a delivery.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Judith said. ‘We can do without.’

  ‘There’s a lady down the road who sells them at her gate,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘It’s only a mile or so – sharp left after the National Trust car park.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Isabel. ‘We’ll try that. Thank you very much.’

  This had been a mistake, Judith thought, as Isabel started the engine again. She’d thought – some rash part of her had thought – it might be a way to normalise things. She and Isabel hanging out, as her father would say, with his careful embracing of colloquialism. Well, if they were on a quest now, she’d better make what she could of it. Get on the front foot.

  ‘How did you and Bill meet?’ she asked.

  ‘At the Guildhall,’ Isabel said. ‘The Guildhall School of Music, on the postgraduate performance course. Bill moved to law college after a few weeks, but we met before he left.’

  Judith was silenced. At the Guildhall in 1995? The very month that Marmion died? God almighty: he hadn’t wasted much time. She’d imagined this marriage as a fallback, something Bill had settled for, perhaps years later. But if . . . It must, then, have been a grand passion. Grand enough to wipe out not just Marmion, but her. Although Bill’s words last night . . .

  ‘We didn’t get married for a few years,’ Isabel said. Had she inferred anything from Judith’s silence? It was impossible to say. ‘Bill was . . . Well, it was just after – Marmion died.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Judith. And then, with a dose of spite that was directed partly at herself: ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘We tried,’ Isabel said. ‘Five cycles of IVF. But then after Bill – you know he had cancer?’

  ‘No.’ I was ill, she heard Bill saying. Maybe it should have changed my perspective more than it did.

  ‘He doesn’t talk about it much,’ Isabel said, and for some reason those words caused Judith a stab of pain. Because they spoke for Isabel’s knowledge of him, or for what Bill had been through? Judith couldn’t tell.

  To her relief, Isabel braked abruptly just then, pointing at a National Trust sign. ‘Look – this must be the turning.’

  There was no gate at the roadside, but they turned onto a track which led sharply uphill, doubling back on itself as it climbed into the woods.

  ‘Is this the right place?’ Isabel asked. ‘Did you see a sign? “Fresh Eggs”, or anything?’

  ‘No,’ said Judith. ‘God – are we OK?’ There was a grating sound, a sudden lurch.

  ‘It’s very slippery,’ said Isabel. ‘I’m not sure this is right.’

  ‘Stop, then. Let’s go back.’

  Isabel put the handbrake on. It was surprisingly dark; the trees hung over the track, enclosing them in a fairy-tale wood. Up ahead there was the suggestion of a house now – a building, at least – and Judith could hear a dog barking.

  ‘I’ll have to reverse,’ Isabel said. ‘I don’t fancy trying to turn: it looks very soft at the sides.’

  She looked calm and capable. Judith imagined her ministering, soothing, coping, when Bill was ill, and she felt a flash of jealousy. But if it was domesticity he’d been after . . .

  She remembered that time she’d rung their house, the day her mother had died. The shock of hearing Isabel’s voice, and the sense, afterwards, that she’d given herself away, after years of restraint. Could Isabel have guessed who it was? Had she even known Judith existed? She certainly hadn’t shown any sign of recognition when they’d been introduced the night before. No, Judith had the advantage there. She’d found out, after that phone call, who Isabel was; she’d been prepared to meet her. She allowed herself a flicker of satisfaction about that.

  The car began to edge backwards, slowly and steadily – and then there was another lurch, a skid, a slide, and Isabel slammed the brakes on.

  ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Hold tight.’

  She turned the steering wheel, put the car back into first gear and let off the handbrake, but when she tried to pull forward again, the wheels spun.

  ‘Damn,’ she said again. ‘I think we’re stuck.’

  Damn was about right, Judith thought. Damn the bloody eggs.

  ‘I’ll get out,’ she said. ‘Hang on a moment, and I’ll see if I can do anything.’

  The back of the car had skewed off the track. It was hanging over a shallow ditch, the rear wheels sunk into the mud. Marvellous, Judith thought. Bloody marvellous. It was only a quarter past eight in the morning, and she was stuck in a bog with Bill’s wife. I
t was cold in the depths of the wood, and they were probably trespassing.

  Isabel put her head out of the window.

  ‘Shall I ring Bill?’ she called. ‘Shall I ring the house?’

  ‘No,’ said Judith. ‘Not yet.’ The other side of the track was much drier: they should have kept over to the left. They should have looked, before they started reversing. But there were some fallen branches she could put under the tyres, and a few large stones that could brace the car from behind. Then if she pushed, and Isabel drove . . . She started gathering sticks and forcing them into the mud, making a grid for the tyres to grip. It might work, she thought, she might be able to get them out, and she felt a flare of pleasure at her resourcefulness.

  After a few minutes, Isabel got out of the car.

  ‘What are you doing? Can I help?’

  Judith halted. She was sweating and grimy by now, a long scratch on her arm.

  ‘I was going to – see those stones there? I was going to put them behind the wheels.’

  Isabel stood for a moment, hands on hips.

  ‘I think it might be better to ring for help,’ she said. ‘What if the car rolls further backwards?’

  Judith frowned. ‘It won’t be able to if we wedge those boulders behind it.’

  Isabel prodded the ground with her foot. ‘It’s very soft,’ she said, a dubious look on her face, but after a moment she shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a go.’

  They worked in silence then, lugging sticks and stones, placing them around both rear wheels. They heard the dog barking again, and a man’s voice shouting in the distance. After a few more minutes Judith stopped to survey their progress.

  ‘I think that’s enough,’ she said. ‘Let’s try. You drive and I’ll push.’

  Isabel opened her mouth to object again, but Judith was already leaning against the boot, testing her footing. Isabel climbed back into the driving seat.

  ‘Ready?’ Judith called, and as the engine revved she leant her whole weight against the back of the car. ‘Come on, you bugger,’ she muttered. ‘Just –’

  And then she leapt backwards to avoid the splatter of mud as the car jolted forward, mounting the mat of branches and heaving itself back onto the track.

  ‘Hurrah!’ Judith brushed herself down, grinning, as Isabel drove a few yards up the hill then halted again. ‘OK,’ she called. ‘Back down again, and keep to the left this time. Slowly, slowly.’

  There was a deep gash across the green of the verge and a litter of sticks and stones, all of it looking conspicuously intrusive. If there was a house further up, if the man with the dog came down this way, it would be obvious someone had been here. Judith kicked some of the branches out of the way, then turned her attention to Isabel, reversing cautiously down the hill.

  A few minutes later they were on the main road again, heading back towards High Scarp. Beside them, the lake gleamed in the early sunshine, an expanse of quicksilver between the mountains.

  Judith had expected some bright chat, or perhaps philosophical reflection – some means, at least, of establishing a joint view of the expedition which they could offer the rest of the group when they returned – but there was complete silence in the car. The escapade in the wood seemed to have set them back, if anything. Perhaps they were both waiting for the other to speak, to set the tone, to decide who owed whom an apology or a vote of thanks. Or perhaps, Judith thought, they had both realised they had nothing, absolutely nothing, to say to each other.

  What did Isabel and Bill talk about? she wondered. She imagined for a moment their twenty years of conversations – trivia and endearments, arguments and in-jokes – as a great stack of paper, a whole room full of marriage-talk in toppling piles, proof of staying power and of the sheer weight of time. But in her mind’s eye the paper was all blank. She must be wrong, of course, but she couldn’t imagine a single thing they might say to each other, even in the context of cancer and fertility treatment. The things she could deduce about Isabel – her pragmatism, her caution, her sheer ordinariness – gave her no clues. Was she satisfied by life? Was she certain of Bill’s affections?

  But then it struck Judith that those sheets of paper weren’t blank at all, just written in invisible ink, never to be read by anyone else. And it struck her, too, that Isabel loved Bill in the same straightforward, candid way that Marmion had. Perhaps the reason she couldn’t figure Isabel out was because she wasn’t Marmion. She wasn’t Marmion twenty years on, in the way they were all themselves twenty years on, but she was in Marmion’s role, she even looked a little like Marmion, and . . . But that was ridiculous, Judith told herself. She’d never have called Marmion pragmatic or cautious or ordinary. She wasn’t even sure, now, that that description could be applied to Isabel. She was a singer, a musician; she was Bill’s wife.

  Those words still brought Judith up short. She didn’t envy Isabel, she told herself, nor pity her. It was more complicated than that. It was as if Isabel’s existence, the existence of the world she had occupied these last fifteen or twenty years, had thrown Judith’s world off kilter. As though she’d been looking at life from the wrong angle all this time.

  As they got closer to home, Judith felt suddenly gloomy. This outing had boxed her in, she thought, to a way of acting, a way of thinking, that she hadn’t wanted to settle for, or . . . No, it was too obscure to pin down. She wished she hadn’t gone, that was all.

  It was only when they turned up the drive to High Scarp that she realised they’d forgotten the eggs. All that trouble, and they’d come home without them.

  October 1995

  Bill

  Bill’s self-possession held until the day before the funeral. His emotions were too immense, too overwhelming even to know what they were: they bore down on him like an avalanche, smothering any glimmer of normality. But on the outside he managed a reasonable semblance of composure. He got himself to the Guildhall every day and went through the motions of meeting his tutors and fellow students. He restricted himself to ringing Judith once a day at the flat, and – after the first couple of times – putting down the phone without leaving a message. He answered his mother’s calls, doing his best to allay her concern for his well-being and to ignore the hint of censure in her voice.

  Early on Thursday morning he woke to hear the phone ringing, and he rolled out of bed to answer it.

  ‘Is that Bill?’ said the voice at the other end, and he felt a drenching chill. Marmion’s mother sounded startlingly, dismayingly like her daughter.

  ‘Yes,’ he managed, after a moment. ‘Hello, Mrs Hayter.’

  ‘How are you, Bill?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. The word was intended to temporise, but, to his confusion, it seemed to be taken as an assurance.

  ‘Good. I’m glad. Bill, would you come and have supper with us this evening? We’d like to have you with us, as part of the family.’

  Bill’s hand tightened on the telephone. ‘This evening? I’m not . . . Yes, of course I can.’

  ‘I’m so glad. We’d like that very much. Come at six.’

  As he stumbled back to bed, Bill wondered whether it was possible for shock to feel so much like a physical illness: whether the symptoms of flu or pneumonia or some sinister tropical fever were common in the bereaved and the guilty. He pulled the sleeping bag over his head to block out the light, but the smell of the ancient nylon was unbearable.

  He was staying, while he looked for somewhere permanent to live, with a friend of a friend in a shabby flat in Leyton. The room was scattered with discarded glasses and half-full ashtrays: he had hardly registered its squalor before. The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made, he thought. He was seeing the room now through Marmion’s eyes, he realised – or through her parents’ – in comparison to their wholesome, homely house, where the only things out of place were books, the only excesses those of artistic feeling. Must he really go there tonight? Why had he not had the presence of mind to devise an excuse, or the courage
to offer it? How would he find clean clothes, let alone prepare his mind, his conscience for the Hayters?

  *

  Marmion’s family lived in a modest terraced house in Crouch End, twenty minutes’ walk from the tube station. When Bill had visited with Marmion he had been charmed by the way so many people fitted into so small a space without any appearance of discomfort, but as soon as the door opened this evening it seemed to him that their collective grief was too great to be contained by the unassuming white stucco: that pain and sorrow and disbelief seeped out from the scuffed skirting boards and the scrubbed floors.

  ‘How nice of you to come, Bill,’ said Mrs Hayter. ‘I know you’d rather be with your friends, but it’s a great kindness.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Bill tried to smile. ‘It’s . . .’ Not a pleasure; that was the wrong thing to say. There was no right thing. Nothing to be said at all.

  He was being shown into the little front room where all the musical instruments were kept, including the grand piano that filled half the floor. With a shock Bill recognised Marmion’s violin case, lying along the front of a shelf. And then he saw, with a greater shock, the photographs of Marmion that sat on every surface, some in frames and others propped against books or candlesticks. Marmion as a baby, her dark curls and bright eyes unmistakable; Marmion as a little girl, plump in a primary school pinafore; Marmion as a teenager, shielding her eyes on a beach; Marmion on graduation day, only three months ago. That photograph had been in the newspaper a few days before: seeing it now, here, closed some kind of circle, as if there had been, all this time, a loophole lying open in his mind. Bill gave a little yelp, then tried to cover it by clearing his throat. Mrs Hayter didn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you, Bill, just for a few moments,’ she said, settling herself in one of the narrow easy chairs that sat between the bookshelves and the tiny hearth.

  ‘Of course.’ Bill squeezed himself into another of the chairs. It bemused him that the solid Hayters managed with such flimsy furniture.