Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ Cressida slid onto the chair that Stephen pulled out for her and helped herself to a cup of tea from the pot. ‘I must have been lucky with my bed.’ The others seemed to have run out of things to say: four pairs of eyes watched as she buttered a piece of toast. She opened her mouth to make some remark about feeding time at the zoo, then thought better of it. It was very strange, all this. Very different from how they might have imagined a gathering of their forty-year-old selves. How wonderful it would be to open the door onto one of those carefree mornings in 1995 and see them all, just for a moment, as they’d been then. Just as she’d seen herself in the mirror a moment ago, her lines and shadows erased, and the future still full of promise.

  It was somehow no surprise that it was Stephen who broke the silence in the end.

  ‘The solicitor’s not due until noon,’ he said. ‘Does anyone fancy a walk before that?’

  ‘I do,’ said Cressida.

  ‘Me too.’ Isabel looked towards the window. ‘Which of these mountains did you climb when you were here before?’ she asked. ‘They look so enticing, don’t they? I’d love to go up that one that looks like a horse.’

  There was a different kind of silence then. No one looked at Isabel, nor at each other.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s time for that,’ Stephen said eventually.

  Cressida glanced at Isabel, wondering how much she’d registered. Bill looked ragged this morning. She felt a little sorry for Isabel, for them both, but impatient too: Bill had had plenty of time to explain things to her. But even so, someone had to rescue them.

  ‘Why don’t we walk down to the village?’ she said. ‘I’d like to see the church again, and it’s a decent walk if we go the long way.’

  *

  The little procession started out half an hour later, covering its awkwardness with a flurry of small talk that dwindled gradually into an unsettled sort of silence. But something odd happened as they made their way along the side of the fell. Happened, at least, in Cressida’s head, although the strange thing was that she had a powerful sense of thoughts, sensations, impressions infusing simultaneously into all their minds, almost as though some collective consciousness had taken them over. As though each of them had succumbed to that momentary longing she’d felt at the breakfast table, and been reeled back twenty years to the time when they’d shared so many of the same preoccupations that they could almost read each other’s thoughts.

  The landscape – the then-and-now landscape – seemed to play a part in this sleight of mind too. Every detail of rock and bracken and turf felt charged with significance, reminding them of what they’d forgotten; of all that they had failed, or refused, to see. A Wordsworthian feeling, Cressida thought. She grasped for the lines, lodged somewhere inside her. For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity. That was Tintern Abbey, not the Lake District, but it was apt; it was what she felt.

  The others were strung in single file along the path, Judith just ahead of her, then Stephen, then Bill, and Isabel out in front, as though – no, this was fanciful – but yes, as though the magnetic pull that prevented the four of them drawing too far apart had no hold on Isabel.

  And then Cressida felt among them, more powerfully than a single imagination could possibly conjure her, the presence of Marmion. She remembered suddenly the irresistible impression she’d had in the middle of Marmion’s funeral that she was there, her voice clearly audible in that deep, still silence. Had that been delusion, or memory, or wishful thinking? Was that what this was too: a fervent wish for them all to think of Marmion, as they traversed the dale from High Scarp to the church once more, and so to invoke her in their midst?

  She hadn’t thought about Marmion for a long time; not properly. What had persisted, she admitted, were her own feelings. If Marmion had come into her mind, it had been to allow herself a moment of bittersweet nostalgia, a fleeting comparison between her own flawed, partial life and Marmion’s unfulfilled promise. And yet a Spirit still, and bright / With something of an angel light.

  Oh, but death, Cressida thought: one should not forget death. She had felt sharply at the time the irrevocable alteration that the awareness of mortality had brought. Almost a contagion: a stain on the living that could never be expunged. A boy at her primary school had died at eight or nine from a rare kind of cancer, and that had been shocking, but the death of a child had the chancy, fictional feel of something that couldn’t possibly happen to you. But the death of a friend on the brink of adulthood was different; perhaps the most devastating kind of loss. Just as they were all poised to take wing, she thought – a terrible metaphor to apply to Marmion’s death.

  But it was clear to her now, as they approached the little bridge that crossed the beck, that she had allowed Marmion’s death to blur into something else, over the years: to become a curious, sad chapter in the narrative of her own life. She had never quite believed that Marmion was gone for ever. She had lost the others too; they had been no less absent, these last two decades, and she could see now that she’d imagined Marmion removed, like them, to some distant place from which she might eventually be recovered. Reaching the steps that led up to the bridge, Cressida stopped, dizzied by insight. She must have swayed, because suddenly Stephen was beside her, grasping her arm.

  ‘Whoa – are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cressida. ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m – I was thinking about Marmion.’

  ‘So was I.’ His hand gripped her more tightly for a moment. ‘It’s hard to believe it’s so long,’ he said. ‘Twenty years since she was here.’

  Cressida nodded. She didn’t trust herself to say anything more – not because she was afraid of being overcome by emotion, but because she was afraid of seeming sentimental in front of Stephen. She was afraid of her reflections being diminished by exposure to the light.

  ‘Do you want to sit down for a moment?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no. We’re nearly there.’ The church tower was hidden just now behind a cluster of pine trees, but it wasn’t far. In a moment they would be able to see it. ‘I was quoting Wordsworth to myself,’ she said, suddenly bolder. ‘It’s funny you should have been thinking about Marmion too: I had a kind of feeling we all were. A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things . . .’

  ‘. . . o’er them sweeps plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Cressida. ‘Very impressive. That’s Coleridge, of course, but . . .’

  ‘My father loved Coleridge,’ said Stephen. ‘He’d studied him at school. He liked the idea that I was swept up in an intellectual breeze, I think. He used to quote that line at me when I came home for the holidays. Slightly missing the point – but who am I to interpret Coleridge to the doyenne of lit crit?’

  Cressida was conscious that she was blushing. This was Stephen who never used to speak about his family; who had seemed, last night, reluctant to speak about anything at all. This surpassed her hopes. Guiltily, she felt Marmion slip a degree or two out of focus.

  ‘Do you read much, these days?’ she asked.

  ‘Not much. Airport thrillers, I confess. A lot of board papers. But occasionally poetry. I –’ Stephen lifted an arm to say after you, and Cressida stepped onto the footbridge. ‘I look at reviews, from time to time, and I buy the odd volume on Amazon, but I’m afraid I don’t often read them. They sit in a bookshelf giving a false impression of erudition.’

  ‘One day, maybe,’ said Cressida. She couldn’t see his face now, nor he hers, and she was glad of it. She felt more moved by this confession than she could explain. Not just the purchase of the poetry books, but the failure to read them: it spoke to her somehow of an unfulfilled need.

  ‘Maybe,’ he agreed. ‘I know it’s ridiculous to imagine that they somehow percolate into my brain from the shelf. No, not just maybe: I hereby resolve to read a little poe
try every night.’

  Cressida didn’t reply. She could tell from his tone of voice that he meant to be gallant, and it spoiled things a little. She’d preferred him being honest: she felt shut out again now. But there had been that moment; she wouldn’t forget that. One intellectual breeze, just for a minute or two. That glimpse of . . . And then she blushed again. What on earth did she know of Stephen’s needs? He lived a life that was entirely alien to her, and he had enough money, surely, to satisfy every conceivable whim – but that was a horrible thing to think. If she meant to punish herself, she should do it without besmirching him.

  *

  The church was just as she remembered. The colours of the stained glass weren’t at their most brilliant this morning, but even so Jesus’s halo shone over the crowd gathered to hear him preach beside the brook, over the sheep herded by a pair of crouching collies (had she forgotten that detail, or not seen it before?), over the smooth surface of the lake into which the faithful had waded in readiness for baptism.

  ‘I remember the acoustic in here,’ Bill said.

  Shutting her eyes, Cressida could almost hear Marmion’s voice, speaking rather than singing, intoning the words of the evening collect. Marmion had found the Anglican liturgy curious, but she’d loved that collect, Cressida remembered. Lighten our darkness: a proper Quaker sentiment. And most apt just now. She had a powerful sense, in the dimness, that they were waiting, all of them, for a shaft of light. Perhaps that was, like her Wordsworthian vision in the dale earlier, mere whimsy, but looking around at their faces – altered, guarded, expectant – she could see in each the need for illumination. For elucidation. All those light-filled words, exposing their separate shadows.

  Meanwhile, no one had answered Bill. He had led them back to 1995, Cressida realised. They were all there, caught up in it again.

  ‘Do you remember that extraordinary farmers’ choir?’ Judith said at last. ‘Agricultural close harmony? God, how we laughed.’

  Her words seemed both to tap into the poignancy of the moment and to downplay it; a skill she’d always had. But laughter, Cressida thought, was almost the most painful thing to remember. Marmion’s infectious smothered mirth as the barbershop group had mangled its hey nonny no’s.

  ‘And my boob in that Stanford motet,’ said Stephen. ‘That was quite a moment.’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ said Cressida, her voice sounding as brittle as ash, ‘that we’re so adept at ignoring mortality. We act as though life is solid and permanent, but in fact . . . The rented world, that’s what we live in. Marmion’s no different from us, she just died sooner.’

  For a moment she could hear her words hanging in the air, and then she felt Stephen’s hand on her arm for the second time that morning. ‘Steady on, Cressy,’ Judith was saying, and Bill was observing that she looked pale, wondering whether she was all right, urging her to sit. Their voices sounded hazy. Cressida felt herself dissolving, and the faces around her swimming, blurring. And then she heard Stephen’s voice, clear and present: ‘Heavens, it’s a quarter to twelve: shall I run back and get the car?’

  October 1995

  Stephen

  All morning Stephen dithered. His suitcase was packed; his farewell meal was prepared. They had taken Robert for a walk in the park, called on the Andrews next door, traced the likely route of the aeroplane on his father’s old globe that still showed the USSR and Rhodesia and even Ceylon, and whose faded colours and obsolete boundaries filled Stephen with a turbulent, impatient desire to spin the past out of sight and fly, fly away into the future. Fretfully he wandered the house, staring at the carefully ordered shelves of the bedroom that seemed to him already like a museum, and pondering the decision he’d been circling for days.

  And then, at last, he made up his mind.

  ‘I need to go to Cambridge this afternoon,’ he said, as his mother began heating soup for lunch.

  ‘Cambridge?’ She looked dismayed. ‘It’s your last day, Stephen.’

  ‘It won’t be the whole day,’ Stephen said. ‘Just a few errands.’

  His mother smiled sadly, stroking his hair the way she used to when he was small, and Stephen felt a tug of affection and an opposing tug of irritation.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back by teatime, I promise.’

  *

  Two hours later he was walking down Fay’s road, turning in at her gate. It felt odd not to have a bike to lean against the fence. He rang the bell and waited. The roses were all finished, except for one late climber still flowering on the front of the house: Stephen could just smell its scent, hanging on the still autumn air. After a few minutes he rang again, and then he wondered if she might be in the garden. The gate at the side was rarely locked, he remembered.

  ‘Fay?’ he called, pushing it open. ‘It’s Stephen.’

  There was no answer. Stephen scanned the shrubberies, then stood in the middle of the lawn, looking up at the blank windows of the house. She must be out, maybe even away. He couldn’t believe now that he’d come all this way without checking she’d be here. Was he a complete idiot to have cooked up this outlandish story on the strength of one photograph? Fay might never have had a baby, and if she had, there was really nothing to suggest she’d given it up for adoption. Certainly nothing to suggest that it was his own story he’d stumbled upon. What had he been thinking – Stephen the rational, the careful, the clear-headed?

  But still he hesitated, standing in the middle of this familiar, pretty garden. He couldn’t be sure, that was the trouble. He couldn’t be sure about any of it: even whether Fay hadn’t wondered, these last three years, if Stephen was her son. He knew birth mothers couldn’t search for their children, that they had to wait to be sought out. Fay had been so kind to them all, and who knew what she’d hoped for? He’d come because he owed it to her to find out, to set things straight.

  Except that he couldn’t, because Fay wasn’t here, and he was flying to Dubai tomorrow.

  He shut the gate behind him and walked slowly away. Frustration flared inside him again before being replaced by a different, a more complicated emotion. Perhaps Fay wasn’t out, but hiding inside the house. Had she realised he’d seen the photograph, and guessed that he’d stumbled on the truth? Perhaps his deductions were accurate, but not his assumption that she wanted to know, and to claim him back. After all, she could have said something at any time over the last three years: she could have dropped a hint that would have alerted him. If any part of his theory was right, then Fay had deliberately said nothing. For her own protection, or perhaps for his – for some complicated reason he couldn’t fathom – she had chosen to let things lie. And so must he, now.

  Home, then, he thought, numb with confusion and – though he resisted it fiercely – distress. He could be back by five if he left now; his mother would be pleased. His mother, who had taken him in and loved him and made of him everything in her power. How could he forget what he owed her, with all this wild speculation about Fay? How could he be so stupid and selfish, so greedy for more than the generous lot he’d been given? He should get back as fast as he could now, and put all this behind him.

  But as he walked back along Barton Road, he remembered Cressida. He hadn’t seen her leaving Marmion’s funeral, hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. Perhaps today’s journey wouldn’t be totally wasted if he could find her now. He’d been glad, afterwards, that he’d made the effort to see Marmion earlier in the summer: even if that colourless lunch hadn’t been much of a comfort to her, it had been the right thing to do. It mattered how you said goodbye, he told himself, for lots of reasons. It mattered how you left things. He should tidy up his loose ends as well as he could. He should take his leave in such a way that he left as little as possible of himself behind.

  October 1995

  Cressida

  The surprise of finding Stephen on her doorstep was almost unwelcome. Certainly the emotion that hit her when she opened the door was so intense that it
felt more like anguish than pleasure.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I had to come up to Cambridge today, and I thought – well, your description of your tiny flat was intriguing. I thought I’d come and see how you were settling in.’

  ‘You’re lucky I’m here,’ said Cressida. She only meant to stall for time, but the words sounded dismayingly sharp. It was Sunday afternoon: he must be leaving tomorrow. Her mind reeled with the enormity of his coming to see her; with the need to avoid reading too much into it, or allowing it to flatter her out of her carefully constructed equanimity. ‘Do you want to come up?’ she asked. ‘Or . . .’

  She couldn’t ask him how long he was staying. The impropriety of that question had been drummed into her as a child, and today the answer, whatever it was, would be too painful to bear.

  ‘This is nice,’ Stephen said, when they reached her rooms. ‘So you’re on the next rung of the ladder now. How does that feel?’

  ‘Not as glamorous as what you’re doing.’

  Cressida tweaked distractedly at her skirt. It felt uncomfortable talking about the future, about life going on, when Marmion . . . It was only because he was going abroad that he’d come at all, she reminded herself. Only because it was a one-off; because he wouldn’t have to see her again. For a moment she felt breathless with desolation.

  *

  ‘Have you seen Fay?’ Stephen asked, as they walked along the Backs half an hour later.

  ‘She’s had flu,’ Cressida said. ‘I called in last week.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why she didn’t come to the funeral.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I went to the house earlier,’ Stephen said, ‘but she wasn’t there.’

  ‘Maybe she’s gone away to convalesce.’ Cressida looked away, resisting a pang of jealousy. He’d been to see Fay first; perhaps he’d only come to find her because Fay hadn’t been in.