Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘Maybe.’

  The remains of a bird lay just off the path, a scattering of feathers among the first drift of sycamore leaves. Death was everywhere, Cressida thought. Things falling out of the sky. She wished Stephen hadn’t come: it wasn’t fair, stirring things up like this.

  ‘How do your parents feel about you going so far away?’ she asked.

  ‘Nervous.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘But they wouldn’t stand in my way.’

  ‘Of course not. No parent would.’ Hers might, though, she thought. They assumed she was staying in Cambridge to prolong her hunt for a husband, and they wouldn’t have thought Dubai at all suitable for that pursuit.

  They didn’t speak for a while then. It saddened Cressida that there was so little to say, and it made her defiant, too. She had suffered, she would continue to suffer, as much as anyone, she thought.

  ‘I know you thought I was wrong to criticise Bill and Judith,’ she said, in a little rush. ‘I know you all thought that. And I know you think I’m congratulating myself on being proved right, but I’m not.’

  ‘Congratulating yourself?’ Stephen turned, horrified. ‘How could I possibly . . . Do you really imagine that’s what I think?’

  ‘I only meant . . .’ Cressida’s voice was sulky, now, with embarrassment. ‘I misspoke. I only meant that you might think I was – that I might be . . .’ She blushed in confusion.

  ‘Cressida.’ Stephen stopped; for a moment she thought he was going to take her in his arms. ‘I’m sure no one thinks that,’ he said. Cressida could feel tears collecting in her eyes now. She would have liked his voice to be gentler, at least. ‘Something like this – you can’t think about what came before. It’s been a huge shock for all of us, but we have to . . .’

  For several moments Cressida waited, but the sentence wasn’t finished. We have to stick together, she imagined him saying. We have to go on somehow. Or might he have come up with something more profound? She would have loved to know what he really thought, but that wasn’t Stephen’s way, especially not now. He was too wary of her, and of the situation.

  In the gentle autumn light she saw with sudden clarity how ridiculous she’d made herself. At every step she’d got things wrong. She had no hope with Stephen, and she had no one to blame but herself.

  ‘What time’s your train?’ she asked: decorum seemed redundant now, and so was self-preservation.

  Stephen looked at his watch, making a brief show of indecision. ‘I really ought to get the 4.17,’ he said. ‘My mother – it’s my last night at home. She’s cooked a chicken.’

  ‘Of course.’ Cressida forced a smile. ‘I’ll walk part of the way with you. I wouldn’t mind a bit more air.’

  After that neither of them spoke very much, and things felt easier. The sun shone weakly, as though applauding their effort at civility, and once or twice a gaggle of students passed, chattering excitedly, barely noticing Cressida and Stephen stepping off the path to avoid them.

  ‘It’s Freshers’ Week,’ Cressida said. It was impossible to believe that so little time had passed since she and Stephen and Judith and Bill and Marmion had been among a crowd like that. Impossible to believe that they were invisible now, lost in the undertow as a new wave broke over them.

  September 2015

  Judith

  Judith had found herself being driven back to High Scarp with Stephen and Cressida, after Cressida’s strange turn in the church. That was certainly better than walking up the hill with Bill and Isabel, but even so, she felt uncomfortably as though she was caught between two couples. Not that poor Cressy was ever going to secure more of Stephen’s attention than she had right now. She could see Stephen felt he was doing the right thing, appointing himself as Cressida’s protector, but she could also see that it was useful to him to have a role to play, a disguise to prevent them seeing too much of the real Stephen, whoever he was. And she could see, too, that Cressida, for all her critical-analytical skills, hadn’t got any better at reading men: that even at forty-one she couldn’t distinguish romantic gestures from good manners.

  Perhaps, she thought, as Stephen’s expensive car climbed the rutted track to High Scarp, the same was true of her, but in reverse. She’d tried to pretend this morning – especially after the outing with Isabel – that the fireside interlude had been a dream, or at least a transport of folly. But it hung there still like a dust storm she might step into at any moment; a tiny tornado that could lift her up and out of the realm of sense.

  She’d been conscious of Bill watching her all the time they were walking, and as the rawness of his feelings came back into focus, the insight she’d had into his marriage earlier on – that complicated sense of constraint and exclusion and incomprehension it evoked – had shifted. Surely, surely it hadn’t been a grand passion but a desperate leap into the unknown? And although something of that hour with Isabel still lingered, Judith was aware that her scruples, stout as they’d proved last night, were not inviolable.

  She understood, too, that this was a different, a more serious business than her carefully managed alliances with Jonty or Arvind. It would never be possible to have half-measures with Bill: if she once succumbed, she couldn’t control what would happen, couldn’t keep herself in reserve, and that frightened her, just as it had twenty years ago. And she knew, just as she had twenty years ago, that it was the same for him – that she would be offering him something marvellous and dangerous, and that he would accept it without hesitation. The thought of kindling the spark of hope she had seen in his eyes last night both thrilled and terrified her.

  She stared out of the car window at the green sweep of the valley, dotted with trees edging towards their autumnal bronze. She could see now, down the long corridor of hindsight, that her rejection of Bill on that stiflingly hot afternoon in Bristol twenty years ago had been the result not just of weariness and guilt but of resentment. Resentment, she understood suddenly, of his coming later than she’d hoped, at a moment of his choosing, as though his passion could be calibrated by the days allowed to pass before he came to claim her. They’d had a shot at something marvellous and dangerous back then: at a flawless, limitless kind of love that was almost impossible to imagine after the fervour and idealism of youth have passed. She hadn’t been able to bear the corruption of it, Judith thought now. Guilt they might have borne – guilt could sharpen and season passion – but not the dulling effect of compromise. Even now she could understand that.

  After two decades in which she’d barely allowed herself a taste of love, the remembrance of what they had almost had, she and Bill, was still hoarded away, treasured, like a glimpse of immortality. For years she had barely admitted its existence, but she allowed herself, now, to think about what had happened that summer; to consider how one step had followed another, and where it had led them.

  Perhaps that first rejection had been headstrong and perverse: but had it, she wondered, made any difference in the long run? Had there been any way for them to escape the trap Fate had set for them? After Marmion died it had been impossible to turn things round, to say yes to Bill instead of no, but suppose they had spent the summer together, feasting on forbidden fruits: wouldn’t the moral heft weighing against them have been even greater, when that aeroplane was shot out of the sky? Perhaps if Marmion hadn’t died – but that line of thought led nowhere but to misery and self-destruction.

  No: the devastating thing was the way the succession of circumstances had made things seem related when they weren’t. The way an event of no real significance which had passed for a calamity within their small protected circle had been magnified by Marmion’s death – by the manner of Marmion’s death – into something of real tragic proportions. That was what had made their position irretrievable.

  But there was, now, another conundrum. Were the questions, the obstacles, the same now, or entirely different? Bill was married, of course, and besides that . . . Oh, it would be simpler, Judith thought, so much simpler, if it we
re a question of weighing up rationally what might be gained and what might be lost, but it was never like that; never a logical decision. One never really believed, in the moment of leaping off the cliff, that the bungee rope would hold: it was always an act of utter recklessness, and this time the recklessness was almost impossible to construe.

  She sighed. Perhaps the best safeguard was that Bill had played his cards so early. Bill never did have much subtlety, she told herself, gathering her self-possession around her again, and the bluntness of other people’s emotions had always bored her. She turned that phrase over in her head: it had a hollow core, she knew, but the words had a comforting ring even so. They had the familiar tonality of the stream of consciousness that had kept her safe these last twenty years.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Stephen, as the car came to a halt. ‘Goodness, and not a moment too soon, by the look of it.’

  Looking out of the car window, Judith could see a man coming up the lower path towards the front door – a man immensely tall and strikingly good-looking. Could that really be Fay’s lawyer?

  ‘Hello,’ she said, as she stepped out onto the gravel. ‘You must be Giles Unwin.’

  *

  There were two memories from her childhood that returned at moments Judith least expected. One had taken place, she assumed, in the garden of her parents’ house in that leafy Bristol suburb, when she was perhaps two or three: a hot day with the sprinkler playing, and a small girl with a black plastic bucket on her head teetering about in a dizzy sort of dance, laughing and laughing. The girl must be her, but the strange thing was that she could see her antics, in her mind’s eye, as though she’d been watching. But she could also feel the pain of laughing so much that her chest hurt, and the pain of knowing that she had to keep laughing, keep swaying, keep her head hidden in the bucket, even though she was frightened about how it might end. It could almost have been a dream, except that she had a photograph that confirmed the truth of it: a faded colour photograph of herself as a small girl wearing a dress with a garish 1970s floral print, playing in a sprinkler with a bucket of water lying nearby. Had she poured the water over herself, or over someone else, before she’d put the bucket on her head? And how had it ended? Had someone rescued her, or had she toppled over and dislodged the bucket herself? How had she ended up, in some corner of her mind, playing out that afternoon on a never-ending loop?

  The other memory was less remote, although the self that occupied it was almost as indistinct. Her parents had taken her to Cambridge, when she was fourteen, to show her around. They’d insisted that it was simply a nostalgic trip for them, since they’d first met at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, on the outskirts of the city, but Judith had known that they meant her to fall in love with the place, and she’d resisted with every ounce of her considerable will. This was a stage when she couldn’t be bothered with school; couldn’t be bothered with anything much; and her parents – each of them diligent, self-motivated, ambitious, despite their proudly professed nonconformism – had been worried about her. They’d thought that if she found something to set her heart on, she might see the point of school work. They must have dragged her round some of the colleges, but Judith had no recollection of that, beyond the vaguest impression of pinkish stone turrets and a garden glimpsed through an archway.

  No, what stood out, what recurred, was one moment. They must have given up on the sightseeing and set out to walk to Grantchester for lunch, and the meadow had been so thick with buttercups that if you half shut your eyes they blurred and fused until it looked as though someone had broken a giant egg yolk over the ground, and the sky was the darkest, heaviest slate grey, lit from beneath by shafts of sunshine that made magic with that great rich spread of colour. And then the rain had come down suddenly, furiously, noisily, but only for a few minutes, only for the count of fifty; and when it stopped, the light had changed and the spell had been broken.

  Her parents had never mentioned any of it afterwards: not the buttercups, nor the light, nor the sudden rain. Had they meant it to be something she could have for herself, or had they simply not noticed the wonder of it? Judith had never known. She had never seen Grantchester Meadow like that again either, never even particularly noticed buttercups growing on it, but the memory had never faded. It had become a lodestone, a mirage, to flicker in her mind through the years of adolescence that followed. Perhaps it still was: a piece of magic never recovered, just like the bucket day. An instant in the past where a part of her had been stranded all this time, waiting for life to begin again.

  It seemed to Judith just now – now that she could look back not just on childhood and adolescence but on a suddenly surprising stretch of life – that there might have been other pieces of magic offered to her, at different times, that she had failed to recognise: visions of the world that might have transformed her if she had allowed them to. Why should that thought occur just now, greeting Fay McArthur’s solicitor on the doorstep of High Scarp, waiting to be told how and why this house had been left to her and her former friends? Was it because he looked, this man, more like a magician than a solicitor, his bulky briefcase surely capacious enough to hold white rabbits and quantities of red silk rather than simply wills and codicils? Because he had come to open a door onto the past as well as the future, to invite them to reconsider what they had held to be true – and perhaps to offer them the chance to start again from the beginning?

  The visitor didn’t reply at once to Judith’s greeting, except to extend his hand for a formal handshake, and Judith studied his face for a moment, searching it for clues. The others were watching him too – Bill and Isabel had just come up the path, and Cressida, poor sappy Cressida, was standing very close to Stephen without quite daring to touch him again. All of them gathered, hopeful and wary, ready to face what was coming.

  The law allowed Fay plenty of scope, Judith thought, to test them, enlighten them, perplex or offend or distress them. What might she have required of them all? What did her knowledge of Fay suggest? She remembered Fay’s generosity, but also her insistence on tradition; her strange combination of imperiousness and spontaneity.

  What she hadn’t taken into account was Fay’s love of games, but the tall stranger’s opening words brought that characteristic sharply back into focus, proving her first instinct about him more accurate than she would have credited.

  ‘I’m afraid I am merely a messenger from Mr Unwin,’ he said. ‘Mr Unwin will be here at noon tomorrow. I am bidden to request your patience for a further twenty-four hours.’

  Cressida

  2014

  Cressida looks at her watch, then out of the window of the University Library, and swears under her breath. She has never lost the habit of swearing, nor the habit of concealing it. Most of the time, at least. Lately she has heard herself swear aloud once or twice, and has noted it as an indication of something, a sign she ought not to ignore.

  Outside the window, rain falls steadily on the patch of grass between the library and King’s College Choir School: falls vertically, so that it barely spatters the panes and can be perceived only with an adjustment of the eye similar to that needed to recognise the seethe of ants beneath a tracery of grass.

  ‘Damn,’ Cressida thinks, or says. Damn the rain, and the bike waiting for her outside. Damn Cambridge, where it’s always raining unless it’s too cold for rain, and where cycling is the expected mode of transport even for a middle-aged woman of some standing in the university. Many of her colleagues have viewed the recent revival of enthusiasm for the bike’s health-giving, eco-sustaining virtues with the smug complacency of lifelong devotees, but not Cressida. The bike reminds her of – connects her to – her years as an undergraduate, and then as a graduate student, a junior research fellow, a newly minted university lecturer. It makes the decades in Cambridge run together into a single continuous line, and it makes her wonder what it has all meant.

  She wonders now, looking out at the rain, in which of those phases she felt most easy about t
he place, and herself. When she was young she’d understood, as most others didn’t, that undergraduates weren’t important; a necessary evil passing through in three-year waves, barely ruffling the surface of the institution. But now she looks at them, riding around the cycle-friendly city with all the grace and confidence of youth, and wishes she could be back among them. At least then, she thinks, with another smothered curse, she might still have chosen a different path, one that led her away from the rain-drenched fens and the gathering knowledge that she will never really count for anything here; that hardly anyone ever makes a mark on the university.

  She gathers her papers with a swift sifting movement and closes the books that lie open in front of her. Enough for today. The rain won’t let up, not until much later, and she’s in no mood to spend the evening in the library. Besides, Wednesday is a Michael evening, and although he has never been tied to anything as tedious as a regular routine, she’s sure he said something about this evening, this Wednesday. Although perhaps he said he was doing something else tonight, she thinks, as she unlocks the bike, already cold-fingered. It’s September: it should be warmer. She should be further on with the work she hoped to get done over the summer. Next month the university will fill up again, and another year will begin.

  *

  Michael does come that evening, almost on the strike of the clock in the hall (her grandmother’s gilt-bronze wall clock, ugly but valuable), as though he has an appointment. Cressida hasn’t allowed herself to cook – hubris is a stern mistress – but she has a pizza in the fridge which could feed two, and a packet of salad she can tip into a bowl. All these things run through her head as she goes to the door: the ability to provide for him without looking as though she was counting on his presence. She feels a prick of pride at her competence at this game, and then a wave of loathing for herself and for the maze of double-bluffs and second-guesses and stifled motives. It was all very well at the beginning, she thinks, but . . . How many years has it been? Time has deceived her, stretching itself out when she wasn’t looking, foreshortening itself when she cared to glance at it. Seventeen years this autumn.