October 1995
Fay
Looking out of her bedroom window one morning, Fay saw that the summer was over. The first scatter of leaves lay across the lawn and the sky had the grey, flat look of a sheet that has been washed too many times. Beside her bed was a calendar on which she was trying to keep track of the passage of time, but sometimes she couldn’t remember whether she’d already crossed off a particular day; wasn’t sure, when she woke from a long sleep, whether another night had passed. But this day, this grey day, seemed to be a Friday. The Macmillan nurse came on Fridays, and it was important that she remembered that. It was necessary to give a good impression or they would try again to take her off to the hospice.
There had been other visits over the summer, some of which Fay remembered better than others. Stephen had come one day: that had been a good day, nearer the beginning of the summer than the end. The roses had been at their best, and she had made him tea. Jeremy had come, and that had been a less good day. He had said he would come again, but Fay had known he wouldn’t. She thought Cressida had come too, maybe even yesterday, but she wasn’t certain of that. Sometimes, some days, it was hard to distinguish memories from dreams. But other things she knew were dreams: Marmion in the garden eating gooseberries that were as small and hard as peas. Such a vivid dream, that, but there were no gooseberries in the garden here, only at High Scarp. No, Marmion had not come, but she had written a thank-you letter in her little-girl handwriting on a postcard of Helvellyn.
Fay was very much troubled about Marmion. On her clearer days she could see that what had happened wasn’t her fault, but on other days Marmion’s grief pressed upon her. She had provided the occasion for Judith and Bill to betray Marmion, after all. She had taken them all to High Scarp, and then – for her own gratification – she had taken them up Nag’s Pike. No good ever came of climbing Nag’s Pike; she ought to have known that. And certainly she had been irresponsible in letting them walk so far without proper footwear. That memory dragged at her conscience: feet tramped through her sleeping mind, pressing on through bogs and thorns and landslides. Judith wouldn’t have fallen if Fay hadn’t shouted out when she saw them; if they had been on a proper path; if they had not been there at all. Marmion might never have known.
No; she couldn’t bear Marmion’s sadness, and she was sorry, deeply sorry, for Judith’s injuries, and for the damage to the whole group. She could conjure still the memory of them in the Master’s Lodge in their first term, that shining innocence and promise they had all had. And she could see them picnicking above Griseley, talking lazily about the future, so happy and certain that she, too, had felt confident of the future for that hour. She’d destroyed all of it, she thought. It was what she had feared at the beginning: she’d been too greedy, too intemperate. She had brought them all down with her.
She shut her eyes again, and floated back into the space in her head where sleep and waking were less distinguishable than they used to be. There was something else she’d been thinking about last night, something important, and if she floated for long enough it would come back to her and she might be able to tell whether it was real. Something she’d read. Her eyes opened again abruptly. Yes, something she’d read in a newspaper. A politician, a woman whose name escaped her now, who’d been reunited with her baby. A woman whose baby had been adopted when she was young, at university, and had come to find her. Was that true? Could such a thing have happened, or had she dreamt it?
She had certainly dreamt, these last weeks, about her own son. All these years she’d tried not to think of him, as they’d advised her, but now that she was dying she couldn’t prevent it. Sometimes it seemed to her, just as she woke, that he was there beside her: some mornings the pleasure and pain of it cut through her consciousness before she remembered about the tumour. A picture of him came into her head now with startling clarity. He looked just like his father: he had that same edge of irritability; that same way of resting his eyes on her absently, casually, until his attention was suddenly snared; that same light in his face when he was happy. The love of her life. How desperately she’d wished that he could have been less honourable, less prominent, less stubborn. How painfully she’d mourned him when he died, still in the grip of that loveless marriage. How very much she’d longed to know his son, and regretted parting with him. If he – if her parents – if she hadn’t been ill . . .
Circumstance was everything, she thought. Luck and chance gave you one life and not another. Lucky politician, lucky mother, to find her son again. But Fay had been lucky to find Marmion and Stephen and Cressida and Judith and Bill. She’d been luckier than she deserved, and then she had spoiled everything, for them and for herself, and there was nothing she could do about it now.
Except that perhaps there was. Someone else was coming today, she remembered: Edward Boreham, her solicitor. She manoeuvred herself carefully upwards and sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments, overtaken by a swell of emotion. Of course, she thought. This was the day when she could set in train the only kind of reparation she had to offer.
*
‘How are you?’ asked Edward.
Fay made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘As you can see . . .’ she said.
He nodded slowly. He was a big man, close to retirement: he’d been her father’s solicitor, and had helped her through the legal tangle her parents had left behind them.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you’ve brought the new will? As we discussed?’
He didn’t answer at once: there was a hesitant look on his face that made her uneasy.
‘We did discuss it, didn’t we? A bequest to St Anne’s, and the rest – High Scarp –’
‘Yes,’ said Edward. ‘I have the names; I have all the details.’
‘Good,’ said Fay. ‘Then I shall sign it. Please don’t . . . I’ve made up my mind, Edward. I’m still compos mentis.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to change your mind,’ said Edward. ‘But there is a problem. There’s something you have to know.’
‘What?’ Fay frowned. Lawyers, she thought, always produced problems, when they were paid to solve them.
‘One of the legatees,’ he said. ‘Marmion Hayter. I’m afraid she’s dead.’
Fay stared at him. Until now she’d been certain she was awake, that this was a good day and she was in the real world rather than a dream.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Edward said. ‘I hate to bring such bad news. It was a plane crash. Maybe you saw, on the news . . .? A terrorist attack, they think. A British Airways flight on the way to New York. Everyone was killed.’
‘But Marmion wasn’t going to New York,’ Fay said. This seemed her best chance: hanging on to the facts she knew to be true.
‘It seems she was,’ Edward said. ‘Her name was . . . I saw it, in The Times. An unusual name.’
Everything was swaying and bending in Fay’s mind now, as though a strong wind had got up from nowhere and was trying to uproot things and carry them away. She had seen a newspaper, not so long ago; it had told her about the politician and her baby. Perhaps there had been – perhaps she had seen – a story about an aeroplane, too. But she hadn’t known that had anything to do with her. She hadn’t wanted to know about people dying, strangers dying. She hadn’t known one of them wasn’t a stranger.
‘She’s dead?’ Fay said. ‘Marmion’s dead?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Edward was looking at her now with a compassion she didn’t want, certainly not from him. ‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ he suggested, and the absurdity of this, the glaring cliché, forced the truth into her mind at last.
Marmion was dead. Sweet Marmion, shining Marmion, wronged Marmion. No one could make amends to her now. For a few moments Fay sat, looking past Edward into the garden, still and solemn at the turning point of the day as it waited for autumn to unclothe it. She would be dead herself soon: it was strange to find that she could feel such sorrow for Marmion. She’d had plenty of disappointme
nts of her own; she’d failed to make of herself all that she might have done. But for Marmion there was a pure, clear river of grief, an outpouring augmented by the terrible certainty that she had died unhappy.
Edward had left the room. She would have preferred him to stay: the room felt strange, all the familiar things in it a long way away from her. Marmion had left her too, now – her face and her voice, which had been so vividly present a moment ago, were fading from view. In their place Fay saw something else: Judith and Bill, clasped together on the side of Nag’s Pike. Judith jumping back when she saw Fay, then falling, falling, falling.
Out in the garden a magpie stalked across the lawn and a little gust of wind caught up a few leaves. It was an effort to place her thoughts in line, to make a different story with them, but she must do that while Edward was here.
If Marmion had lived, surely there would eventually have been healing, and a return of happiness? The same purity of mind that had caused her to suffer so deeply would have equipped her to love and be loved again. Whereas for Judith and Bill . . . What they were guilty of could multiply now into something that might feel – might be – irrecoverable. Something that might consume their lives just as surely as this thing multiplying inside her head was consuming hers. What they had done – all they had done, Fay thought – was to fall in love. Everything else was circumstance. She of all people should understand that.
Edward came back into the room, carrying two mugs.
‘Thank you,’ Fay said, as he set one down beside her. She could hardly stomach tea now, but this cup – milky and sweet, no doubt – was welcome, nonetheless.
He sat a little further away this time, as though to emphasise that the business he had come to discuss was not pressing; that there was still plenty of time. Or perhaps because he was afraid of her illness. She avoided mirrors herself, now.
‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘No: let me think for a minute.’
‘Of course.’
Once more she dragged her thoughts into focus. She couldn’t count what they had meant to her, those five; what she had felt for them. And they were so young. It shouldn’t be the case that life was irrevocably altered by something you did at that age. Marmion was dead, that was a terrible thing, but Bill and Judith . . . It was too painful, too awful, to be dying just when there were people who needed her, whom she cared about, who might let happiness escape them. What she had planned seemed less certain now. There seemed less point to it. But might it help them? Could she do what no one had been able to do for her, by showing them a future that was still there, still possible?
But the face of her son came back to her again now – that little boy, that little baby she had held in her arms – summoned, perhaps, by the depth of her sorrow, or the faint flickering of hope. She couldn’t help feeling it must mean something, his visiting her in her dreams, and his claim, surely, was . . . That other son had found his mother. Hers wouldn’t come now, not before she died, but one day he might. Like the politician’s child, he might try to find her when he had children of his own. He might need her help too: she couldn’t bear him to be left empty-handed.
Could she do both, then? How could she help all of them? Not by selling High Scarp; she couldn’t do that. High Scarp was what she had to give: it was what meant something to Bill and Judith and the others. And if he never came, her son . . .
Desperation made her voice stronger and her mind more resolute. ‘Tell me, Edward, is it possible to arrange things so that . . .’ How long? she wondered. How long for the son who might never come: how long so that it wasn’t too late to give the others another chance? ‘Is it possible to delay a bequest?’ she asked. ‘To allow time for someone to . . . come forward?’
‘Most things are possible,’ he said. ‘Property can be held in trust, for example.’
Time slipped by: she wasn’t sure how much. Was ten years enough? she wondered. What if he came in eleven or twelve? Twenty years, then. Her head ached and ached. She couldn’t imagine herself dead for twenty years.
‘Everything must be kept just as it is,’ she said. ‘At High Scarp. Is that possible?’
‘Someone can be appointed to look after it,’ he said. ‘Funds can be set aside. Our Manchester office, perhaps, could –’
‘Exactly as it is,’ Fay said. She could feel fervour building inside her now, and she knew she must be careful not to let it spill over. She couldn’t have him doubting her sanity, the clarity of her intentions. ‘For twenty years. Not a word. They shouldn’t be told I’m dead, even. And then bring them all back to High Scarp. Make sure they all come.’
‘Very well.’
Was he humouring her? Fay wondered. She must be sure he wasn’t. She had a picture in her head now that made her feel peaceful: her friends happy, and High Scarp too. That lovingly constructed past she had given the house coming true, and her ghost, her spirit, infusing the place.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I want to see it all drawn up. I’ll sign it tomorrow.’
He smiled at her then. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow with a colleague. A witness.’
And so this afternoon she must rest, Fay told herself, as the front door shut behind him. She must be sure of tomorrow.
September 2015
Bill
Bill slept badly, the first week back home. Several nights in a row he lay sleepless for hours, watching the clock flick from eleven to twelve, one to two, three to four, before dropping into a dizzy, dreamless slumber from which he woke each morning feeling worse than he had the night before. Once or twice, in the depths of the night, he wondered if the lymphoma was coming back. It had been in his mind a good deal since he’d learned that Fay had been ill that summer, careering towards the end of her life despite seeming so full of life and vigour. But there were no night sweats, no aches and pains. His symptoms, he thought, were due to something else that simmered and propagated in his blood.
Most nights Isabel slept deeply beside him, oblivious to his restlessness, and he was grateful to be spared her questions and her worry. But one night as he turned once more from his back onto his side, adjusting his pillow with a surreptitious tweak, he felt her moving beside him and then, without a word, climbing out of bed. A moment later the bedroom door opened and closed quietly. Bill lay still, listening. She was gone longer than he expected, and he wondered what she was doing; how long she’d been awake.
Irritated with Isabel – irritated with himself, too – Bill turned onto his back again. It was hot tonight: the air was very still, the white walls of the bedroom pressing in out of the darkness. The door clicked open again, and he shut his eyes. Better to pretend to be asleep, he thought. Better to lie still and let Isabel slip in beside him. But she didn’t get back into bed. For a few moments he heard nothing, and then a rustle near his shoulder alerted him to her presence on his side of the bed. There was a smell in the room that he couldn’t immediately identify – a musky, heady scent. Isabel was leaning over the bed now; he could feel her breath on his neck. Terror flushed through him: perhaps she meant to murder him as he slept. Perhaps she’d seen through his perfidy and decided to put an end to it. He opened his eyes again and looked straight into her face: not the face of a murderer; of course not. It looked very round and smooth in the half-light.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘I picked lavender for you.’
‘Lavender?’
‘It’s still in flower, along the path at the front.’ She showed him the stalks, then laid them beside his pillow. ‘I thought it might help you sleep.’
Bill felt something entirely unexpected then. Surprise, relief, perhaps a whiff of amusement – but he was painfully touched, too. The lavender smelled of the night: he imagined her unlocking the front door and padding out into the garden barefoot, the dew on her ankles and the moonlight catching a faint shimmer of purple in the border. It was the gesture of someone in love, he thought.
‘Isabel –’ he bega
n.
‘Ssh.’ She crumbled the final head of lavender between her palms and sprinkled it over the bed. ‘My poor Bill; what a time you’ve had.’
‘What do you mean?’
She took his hand. ‘That weekend,’ she said. ‘All that trauma from the past. It had to be got through, but I could see how hard it was for you.’
‘Isabel –’ he tried again. He felt peculiarly powerless now, lying flat and looking up at her. He wondered if she was slightly mad, but all he could see in her face was compassion.
‘It’ll be all right,’ she said now. ‘It’s a lovely house, and when we can go there on our own it’ll feel quite different. We can make it ours; take some of our own friends.’
Bill could think of nothing to say. Which friends could she mean? he wondered. His head spun: it felt as though two things that wouldn’t mix were being swirled into each other in an attempt to make them look like part of a whole. Isabel’s view of the situation and his, he thought: oil and water.
‘Come and get into bed,’ he said. ‘You’ll get cold standing there.’
She laughed. ‘It’s awfully warm in here. Aren’t you hot?’
But even so she climbed in and stretched out beneath the sheets with a little sigh.
‘Thank you for the lavender,’ he said. ‘That was kind of you.’
‘Oh, Bill.’ She rolled towards him and propped herself up on one elbow. If only she looked a little troubled, he thought. If only she showed some sign of understanding. ‘I love you, you know,’ she said. ‘Don’t you – I’ve always loved you. Surely you know that?’
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