Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘No.’ It was Stephen who answered. ‘No, they can’t leave my brother.’

  On an impulse, Fay turned again.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Did I hear that you have a birthday coming up? I wonder . . . Sometimes I invite some of the choir for supper. Would you all like to come? One evening this week?’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ said Cressida. ‘I’m not sure exactly –’

  ‘I’m sure we’d love to,’ said Marmion. She looked round at the others, and there was more nodding. ‘It’s Wednesday, Stephen’s birthday.’

  ‘Wednesday it is,’ said Fay. She took a notebook and pen out of her handbag and wrote down the address, then tore it out and handed it to Marmion. ‘Can you read that? It’s not far. Shall we say eight o’clock?’

  *

  It was one of the features Fay liked least in herself that shyness – a shyness she would have hated to admit to – made her manner rather stilted, but she told herself, as she walked back through the college and across the river, that they wouldn’t think anything of it, that young tribe. In their eyes she was a different species from them: certainly middle-aged, perhaps even old. If they found anything odd it would be her invitation, not its formality.

  She felt a little giddy at her audacity – but it was only an invitation to supper, she told herself. Part of the giddiness was due to that wash of emotion as she’d watched them, imagining them in the centre of a Cinquecento canvas: almost awe, she thought, at their youthful certainty and vibrancy and beauty, and a desire to earn herself a taste of that vicarious joy. But slowly, slowly, she warned herself, already conscious of the agony of overstepping the mark, putting them on their guard. A deal of self-restraint would be necessary. She had never been good at love affairs, she thought wryly, even when it was more an idea than a person, than people, that had captivated her. Even when it was herself she really yearned for; her younger self, glimpsed in the radiance that surrounded that quintet.

  The broad sweep of grass and trees along the Backs seemed magical this evening. It was a clear night, the sky dappled with stars and a heavy three-quarter moon hanging low over the dark bulk of the University Library. Sometimes Fay thought it would have been better to sell her parents’ house and move elsewhere, somewhere without associations. But the associations were more good than bad, and she’d feared that there wasn’t enough within her to populate an existence elsewhere: that Cambridge was too much part of her for it to be possible to separate herself from it. Here she could be someone – not Someone with a capital S, like Jeremy, but a person who passed muster. Here her knowledge and her accomplishments and her possessions added up to just enough. There was always a balance to be struck between claiming, wanting, attempting too much for herself and too little: either could be disastrous. But on that narrow distinction, she thought now, rested the equilibrium of her life.

  Turning up Barton Road, she smiled at the tone of melodrama that had crept into her internal monologue. She sounded like a crank, she thought. She wasn’t a crank. Those children wouldn’t think she was a crank. She felt she knew them a little already. Marmion looked to her like a saint: not a Cinquecento saint but a modern-day one, with that wonderful smile and eager kindness. And Stephen: did she mind, Fay wondered, about the adoption? No; it was . . . In any case he was younger, only a little younger, but – she wouldn’t think about that, anyway. She wouldn’t confuse things in that way.

  Cressida, she decided, was either cleverer than she looked, cleverer than girls of that kind usually were, or not quite as clever as she hoped. Either way, she would be anxious about her degree for the next three years, poor thing. Bill, the ex-chorister, had a Midlands inflection to his voice that made him sound solidly comfortable in his own skin – which he might be, of course, although if he was a musician his psyche might not be quite so straightforward. And Judith: she seemed to Fay the most mysterious. The most dangerous, if one wished to continue being melodramatic. She would take trouble to pay attention to Judith, to get to know her properly.

  Back home, she put the kettle on and sliced bread and cheese for supper. It tasted good: the same kind of Cheddar she always bought, and the end of a loaf she’d started yesterday, but the whole somehow greater than the sum of its parts. She would have to include her mood and this evening’s encounters in the sum, she thought. It felt good to ride this little billow of elation. To sense the possibility of happiness – or if not quite that, then at least something more than maintaining an even keel, a steady state, although that had been enough to aim for, enough to settle for, these last few years. It was three years, now, since she was last . . . She felt safe, now, from all that: safe enough to hope for something, a little something. But she must be careful not to let her expectations build too far.

  September 2015

  Judith

  For several seconds there was silence in the room. If the solicitor hadn’t had their full attention before, Judith thought, he certainly did now.

  ‘She died when?’ Cressida asked, her voice almost a squawk.

  ‘The seventeenth of October 1995,’ said Giles Unwin. ‘She took some trouble to . . . The terms of her will included a requirement that the news of her death be concealed, as far as possible. I can see that that endeavour was successful, at least as far as the four of you are concerned.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Bill. ‘Why did she want to keep her death a secret, and delay the bequest? She must have given an explanation.’

  Unwin shook his head apologetically. ‘The will was drawn up and witnessed by a partner in our London office, Mr Boreham, who died some years ago.’

  ‘She must have known she was dying,’ Judith said. Her mind was fizzing with inference and memory. Fay must have been ill, that summer: had they missed the signs of it?

  ‘And she changed the will in our favour just before she died?’ Cressida asked.

  ‘No previous wills survive,’ said Unwin, ‘but I understand that this was the first to name you all.’

  ‘What about Marmion?’ asked Cressida. ‘Does her name – was she included too? Marmion Hayter?’

  Unwin shook his head again. ‘No, just the four of you.’

  ‘Marmion was dead by the fifteenth of October,’ Stephen said. He hadn’t spoken before, and they all turned to look at him now as though his voice had greater authority than the rest. ‘Fay must have known that Marmion was dead when she made the will. I wonder if that . . . I suppose we’ll never know whether that affected her decision.’

  ‘Are we the only legatees?’ Judith asked. ‘What about the rest of her estate?’

  ‘The major part of the estate was left to the four of you,’ Unwin said, ‘after a bequest to St Anne’s College, Cambridge.’

  Of course, Judith thought. Not the scouts or the Church: St Anne’s.

  ‘And what conditions were attached?’ she asked. ‘I assume there was a condition precedent?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Unwin. ‘The more unusual elements of the condition precedent have already been discharged. That is to say: that the property be held in trust for twenty years, and the terms of the will not be disclosed during that period. Also that this house, High Scarp, be maintained in the same condition in the interim, and that the four legatees be required to spend a weekend in occupation before the bequest took effect.’

  ‘And the rest of the condition precedent?’ asked Bill. ‘Is there more?’

  Unwin turned to look at him.

  ‘I know that you are a solicitor, Mr Devenish,’ he said, ‘and that Ms Malik is a barrister. You can of course read the will for yourselves.’

  ‘For the lay people among us,’ said Stephen, his voice unfamiliarly terse, ‘a summary would be helpful.’

  ‘You are required to keep the house, High Scarp, for a minimum of five years,’ Unwin said. ‘Ample funds are available for its upkeep. You are required to spend a weekend here, together, every year during that period. After that, you are free to dispose of the property as you wish.’
>
  ‘That’s all?’ said Bill.

  ‘All?’ said Judith. ‘It sounds . . .’

  A weekend here, with Bill, with all of them, every year, she was thinking. Fay couldn’t have had any idea what that would mean.

  ‘I don’t understand about the twenty years,’ said Cressida, ‘but otherwise it’s extraordinarily generous of Fay, don’t you think? Extraordinarily.’

  ‘Is there nothing more?’ Stephen asked. ‘No – letter for us? No further explanation?’

  ‘Nothing of any substance,’ said Unwin. ‘The rest is merely detail.’

  ‘Lapsang souchong,’ said Judith.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Maintained in the same condition down to the contents of the kitchen cupboards,’ Judith said. ‘The brand of soap in the bathroom.’

  ‘Miss McArthur’s wishes were closely followed.’ Unwin permitted himself a self-satisfied smile.

  ‘Clearly.’ Judith felt slightly sick now. It felt very strange, all this. The terms of the will had proved unexpectedly simple, but its impact was more devastating than she could have imagined. She had no idea, no sense at all whether Fay’s intentions had been benign or malevolent: after all this time it was impossible to deduce what had been in her mind, nor how she’d imagined this bequest affecting them all. And in the face of this discombobulating fact everything else felt less clear – as though her mind was a pool which had just settled, only for something large and heavy to drop into it, throwing up a swirl of weed and sediment to cloud her view again.

  It seemed to her now that they had all been taken in, last night, by the madrigal singing and the current of nostalgia that had flowed through that hour. She’d been taken in, anyway: perhaps the others had kept their heads. How funny that they’d always seen her as the hard-headed one, the hard-hitting one. That thought made her smile briefly, and Bill, catching her eye across the table, began to smile too.

  Oh Bill, she thought, speared by a sharp pang of desire and regret. He was right that they had passed up – that they had denied themselves – what, though? Could it ever have been an uncomplicated happiness? Was there such a thing?

  She knew the compromises and concessions in the strange life she had concocted for herself did her no good. It was almost unbearably tempting to believe that she and Bill might have a second chance now of something better, but she didn’t believe in happy-ever-after, or in people getting what they deserved. Not even in them getting what they hoped for, or worked for, or snatched back from the ruthless grasp of life – and she had never hoped, never worked, hard enough. The most terrifying thing was that she hardly believed in her own life any more; in the conviction she had sustained that everything was essentially all right. Or if not that, that her actions, her motives, could be traced back to a right intention.

  As Giles Unwin gathered together the papers that provided the final account of Fay’s life, a great depth of inconsolability yawned open inside Judith. It was as though she had imagined all this time that she was living her life as proof of something, and she had forgotten long ago what she needed to prove, or to whom. She seemed, now, to have been living utterly without point or purpose.

  March 1995

  Fay

  ‘Go home and think about it,’ the Consultant said. ‘Don’t make a decision now. Is there someone you can talk it over with?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fay said. She’d forgotten this doctor’s name: that seemed a bad sign, but presumably it was shock that did that. She leant forward slightly, trying to see his name badge, but it was hidden by his lapel.

  He looked at her, concerned. He was a big man: a rugby player, perhaps, in his day. She didn’t like to think of those hands inside her head.

  ‘Do you want to ask anything else now?’

  ‘Your name,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’

  He smiled briefly, not quite managing to conceal a flicker of something that might have been distress, but was probably impatience.

  ‘Reynolds,’ he said. ‘Mr Reynolds. Jim.’

  Fay nodded.

  ‘We’ll book you into my clinic on Friday,’ he said. ‘We can talk about it again then. OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fay. But she knew already what her decision was. Not surgery. The maths didn’t mean very much to her – so many per cent chance of this or that – but she had grasped the bottom line: whichever way you looked at it, the news was bad. There was little hope that an operation would improve things, and a substantial risk that it would make things worse. Surgery was what they offered because there wasn’t anything else. Radiotherapy wasn’t indicated, the Consultant (she’d forgotten his name again) had said, in this particular case. In the case of her particular brain tumour.

  As she drove home, the world swam a little – not the world she was driving through, but the one in her head. What she’d been told seemed highly implausible, and the fact that she was being advised to do nothing about it confirmed the impression that it was something she didn’t really need to think about. The headaches weren’t so very bad, and now she knew there was nothing to be done about them, she could take whatever painkillers she liked. Everything would be better when she got home; when she got back to normal.

  *

  When the bell rang at eight, she was taken by surprise. On the doorstep the five of them stood, cheerful, expectant. Bill held out two bottles of wine.

  ‘Are we early?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ She mustn’t let them see that she’d forgotten they were coming. ‘No, of course not. I thought we’d go out tonight. I thought I’d take you out.’

  She drove them to the Chequers at Comberton. By now she felt a little shaky, but they didn’t seem to notice. They were engaged in an argument, passionate but humorous, about punk rock, which they seemed to regard as a historical phenomenon. They had always been good at entertaining themselves, her little coterie. And at entertaining her, of course. They had no idea, she thought, how much difference they had made to her: that she wanted to live, now, more than she had for years. There was a strange sort of whistling in her head, like a tap running or a radio that wasn’t picking up a signal, but if she focused hard on what they were saying she could ignore it. She ordered fish and chips – she hadn’t had fish and chips for donkey’s years – and ate the whole plateful.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ Judith was saying, the next time Fay tuned into their conversation. ‘You’ve only got three exams, if you don’t count that wishy-washy practical stuff, and they’re over by the first week of June.’

  ‘The twenty-eighth of May, actually,’ said Marmion.

  ‘I’ve got nine,’ said Judith. ‘Nine. And one of them is constitutional law. I rest my case.’

  Bill put an arm around Marmion. ‘Don’t rest it on Marmion,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a proposition for you all,’ Fay said, when there was a lull in the conversation. ‘Would you like to come up to my house in the Lake District in June? After Finals?’

  They looked at her, eyes wide.

  ‘After Finals and before graduation,’ she said. ‘There’s a little music festival in the village. You could sing.’

  ‘After May Week, do you mean?’ asked Marmion, a little anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fay. ‘I’ll check the dates, but I’m sure it’s after May Week. You can’t miss that.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a house in the Lake District,’ said Stephen.

  Fay looked at him: dear Stephen, she thought. That sombreness, that diffidence. They were all so different; it was a wonder they got on so well. She had no idea how she was going to manage without them, next year. And then it occurred to her that she might not have to. She might not have to manage anything, next year.

  ‘You’ll like it there,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’

  *

  On Friday she sat in Mr Reynolds’s office again. They had rung with an appointment, so eager to make sure the time was convenient that it had seemed churlish not to accept.
>
  ‘Right,’ he said, when she told him. ‘If you’re sure you’re happy with that decision.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She suspected that he liked the patients who said yes to surgery better. What was the point of being a brain surgeon, after all, if everyone said no?

  He nodded for a while, and then he shut her notes and smiled at her.

  ‘Dr Oblonski will look after you, then,’ he said. ‘He’s the best person to manage things from here.’

  Dr Oblonski was the opposite of Mr Reynolds: a small man, very bald, who reminded Fay somehow of a hedgehog. No prickles, though. It was his face, small and pointed, that accounted for the resemblance.

  Dr Oblonski asked her a lot of questions she’d answered already, and others she hadn’t.

  ‘You have a son, Mrs McArthur?’ he asked.

  ‘Miss,’ said Fay.

  ‘I apologise.’

  He waited.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fay. ‘Yes and no. I had a son, but he was adopted.’

  Did he really need to ask all this? she wondered. Was some kind of psychological therapy required, perhaps, in this sort of case? But if he knew she had a son, then it must be recorded in her notes. Everything must be recorded in her notes.

  ‘You were unwell, after he was born.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fay.

  ‘But there have been no – recent recurrences?’

  ‘Of what?’ Fay asked. ‘Of pregnancy, or . . .’

  Dr Oblonski made a little sound that might have been a laugh. A hedgehog laugh, Fay thought.

  ‘There have been no recent recurrences,’ she said. ‘I have been quite well for the last few years. Quite well.’

  *

  Dr Oblonski prescribed steroids and said he would see Fay in six weeks. Perhaps it was the steroids, perhaps it was the six weeks’ respite, but after that the world slid back into focus and the radio interference stopped. When she went back after Easter he said she looked well and she told him she felt fine, absolutely fine. She went to evensong at St Anne’s that evening and the choir sang ‘God Be in My Head’, which struck her as a nice piece of divine wit. She sat in the stalls in the half-dark with her eyes shut and thought, everything is all right now.