Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ She looked puzzled, as though she wasn’t sure whether he was teasing her.

  ‘That’s the thing, Isabel,’ he said. ‘I never thought love came into it very much.’

  The words seemed to float for a moment, suspended above them like little puffs of smoke. As though his next words might set light to them both, Bill thought, burning to the ground this marriage they had both lived in for fifteen years. Isabel’s face had shut tight: he couldn’t be sure she’d understood, but it was said now, irrevocably, and his mind felt suddenly gloriously clear. Everything had fallen into place, the muddy emulsion of oil and water separating smoothly into two discrete layers.

  Other people, he thought, might see things differently. Isabel’s declaration might have summoned nobler instincts, a recognition that what he had given her all these years was worth more to her than he’d realised. But all he could see was the deadening effort it had taken to achieve a convincing equilibrium between them. He had thought they had an arrangement they both understood: that they had settled for each other, fifteen years ago, on equal terms. But if she loved him, and he didn’t love her – if they had lived on a false premise all this time – surely that altered things?

  There was a sense, he thought, in which she had not been honest with him either. And he couldn’t sustain the illusion under any longer. The damage that might be done to Isabel must be weighed against the damage that had already been done to him and to Judith: and surely, surely, his love for Judith had just as much right to flourish as Isabel’s for him.

  ‘Isabel –’ he said.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about this now.’

  Her voice was calm and firm, as it was when she urged him not to dwell on work, not to talk about his illness in the middle of the night. But he knew now that she had heard, and that she understood, and that things would never be the same between them again.

  *

  Judith had identified a pub two miles from the motorway, halfway between London and Shrewsbury. It would have been simpler for each of them to catch a train to Birmingham, Bill thought, but there was something powerfully transgressive about driving towards each other along the busy midday trunk roads and then parking side by side in a place neither of them knew. There was no explanation for this behaviour except the correct one – except that Bill had no idea, really, what the explanation for their behaviour was; what the purpose of this meeting was.

  They arrived within five minutes of each other. Judith was wearing a thin wool dress with a silk scarf around her neck: she shivered slightly as she got out of her car.

  ‘It’s colder here than in London,’ she said. ‘God, this place looks a dump.’

  Inside the pub, there was a smell of stale beer. A man with a red face looked up from the till.

  ‘Are you doing food?’ Bill asked.

  ‘Only sandwiches, midweek. Chef’s not here until six.’

  Bill looked at Judith. In the dim glare of the fluorescent light her skin looked like an oil painting, its texture lovingly evoked by Rembrandt or Holbein. He felt as though he’d stolen her; as though it should be blindingly obvious to anyone that she didn’t belong to him.

  ‘A sandwich is fine,’ she said.

  When they’d ordered, Bill looked around at the empty tables, inviting her to choose, but Judith demurred.

  ‘Let’s go outside for a bit,’ she said. ‘All that time in the car . . .’

  The garden was planted in the style of a municipal park, beds of red flowers breaking up a lawn that looked as though it had been cut too short, like a little boy’s first haircut. A path led to a row of fledgling leylandii, with a brook half-visible through it.

  ‘What a place,’ said Judith. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Bill said. ‘It’s a place.’

  He had almost given up hope when she’d rung, a week after he’d written to her. A phone call on his mobile, one lunchtime. She’d sounded chary, non-committal, but she had rung, and music had filled his head for the rest of the afternoon. Can you get away? Yes, he could; yes, he would, of course, at the click of her fingers. Four more days had passed in painful suspense, and now here they were at last, peering through the leylandii at the water as though the glint of light on its surface might help them through this encounter.

  ‘This doesn’t feel like I expected,’ said Judith.

  His heart bumped. He wanted very badly not to disappoint her. ‘Worse?’ he said. ‘Better?’

  ‘Neither. No, not worse. But it’s . . . I’ve been trying to see things separately, but they’re not separate, are they?’

  ‘What things?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Time, distance, age. Fay.’ She paused, not looking at him. ‘Isabel. Marmion.’

  ‘They sound quite separate when you list them like that.’ He bit his lip, not quite on purpose. Should he tell her about Isabel? Was it better to tackle her worries one by one, or roll them into a single will-we-won’t-we decision?

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But you wanted to meet, he thought.

  ‘Now we’re here, isn’t it worth . . .?’

  Judith made a sudden movement that reminded him of a bird lifting from a perch: a flutter of feathers that might indicate a decision to take off, or merely a resettling of wings.

  ‘Was Fay trying to reproach us?’ she asked. ‘I feel as though that must be the answer, but it seems an odd way to go about it.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know,’ Bill said. ‘I think of it as providence. Whatever she meant, that was the effect.’

  ‘But it matters what she meant,’ Judith said.

  ‘It doesn’t need to.’ Bill’s eyes lingered on the contour of her neck. He’d never forget that moment, that glimpse of a triangle of skin at Townend. The way it had seemed to hold the key to the rest of her.

  A wisp of wind cut through the garden, and Judith shivered.

  ‘Let’s go back in. The sandwiches might be ready.’

  *

  While they ate they spoke of other things: the rugby World Cup, Judith’s involvement in a recent asylum case, Housman and Shropshire. The sandwiches weren’t bad, although Bill longed for a steak pie, something with more substance. All this time they were skating, skating, he thought, and the minutes were passing. He couldn’t bear the idea that there might be nothing to show for this meeting. Why hadn’t they . . .? He felt suddenly frantic. They could have gone anywhere, done anything, and they had chosen lunch in a third-rate pub.

  ‘Judith,’ he said. ‘There don’t need to be any obstacles, if you . . . Certainly not Isabel. I’ve already . . . We made a mistake, you and I. We should have hung on.’

  He could see his face reflected in her eyes, and the pub folded in around him. Like looking at himself in a crystal ball, he thought. That was something he’d never managed, though: his failure of imagination had always been part of the problem. His failure of conviction, too – but just now, with her face so close, he was consumed by a fever of yearning, by disembowelling lust. He would risk anything, he thought, pay any price.

  Judith pushed her plate away.

  ‘I shouldn’t have suggested this,’ she said. ‘I got your hopes up. Mine too, if it’s any consolation. But at least this way you won’t be left wondering.’

  ‘Please,’ he said, as she reached for her handbag. ‘Please don’t go yet. If you don’t love me, I’d rather you told the truth, but if you do . . .’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Bill,’ Judith said. ‘We’re not students any more. You can’t invoke love like that, like a trump card. It sounds ridiculous.’

  ‘Not to me,’ said Bill. ‘Why are we both here, otherwise?’ He gazed at her, desperate to prevail. ‘I can’t find the magic words, Judith. I can’t explain things well enough to convince you, but I’m sure of what I feel, and I can’t bear to let it go again.’

  Judith looked down at the table, p
icking up crumbs with her fingertip.

  ‘Love is a trump card,’ Bill said, ‘but we failed to play it last time. This is the truth, Judith: if Marmion hadn’t died, we’d have ended up together. We were all so young; everything would have settled down.’

  ‘But she did,’ said Judith. ‘That’s the way it is. Believe me, I’ve been bloody furious about her dying, but that only makes it worse.’

  Bill stared. ‘But you’re a rational person. How can you allow something totally beyond our control to ruin both our lives?’

  Perhaps he’d gone too far, he thought: perhaps her life hadn’t been ruined. But she didn’t deny it.

  ‘My darling,’ he said, ‘won’t you let me –’

  ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘I can’t think. I don’t know. I’ve got my life . . .’

  He waited, fighting down an urge to grab her hand and hold it tight. And then, with one of those fluid, decisive gestures, she stood up.

  ‘I can’t do this any more,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go now.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Bill asked. ‘Can we –’

  ‘Don’t ask anything else,’ Judith said. ‘Please don’t.’

  Bill watched her put on her coat and slide her bag over her shoulder. He hadn’t been able to believe she wanted to meet, and now he couldn’t believe she was leaving. There were two stories, he thought: the one that should never have happened, and the one that looked as though it never might. Had it ever been possible that this meeting would change the course of things? If he’d behaved differently – said different things . . .

  He waited a few minutes before following her out to the car park. There was another moment of wild hope then, but the space where her car had been was empty. His mind spun as he started the engine, retraced his steps to the motorway junction – past the garage on the corner, the farm gate – and rejoined the traffic heading north.

  So that was that: that was the end. The fourth time, he thought, that she’d said no: he’d have to accept that she meant it now. She’d come all this way to tell him, perhaps not knowing what the answer would be until she got here.

  Would it have been better, he wondered, to leave things as they were, with enough uncertainty, enough possibility to sustain him?

  Would Judith come to High Scarp next spring, as they had all undertaken to do? He should at least have asked her that.

  Into his head, just then, came Marmion’s voice, clear and fresh across the decades. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing. Could he believe that, now? That behind all this heartache and misadventure was divine judgement? The irony was that the nearest he’d ever come to God was in Marmion. The only time he’d ever believed in goodness and mercy.

  He hadn’t quite reached Birmingham when he heard his phone buzzing. Isabel, he thought, and he felt a clutch of dread. He had offered his heart to another woman and been refused, and he couldn’t bear the thought of going home to Isabel tonight.

  But when he glanced down, waiting for the answerphone to kick in, it wasn’t Isabel’s face that looked out from the caller ID screen. It was Judith’s.

  Epilogue

  Heathrow airport, October 1995

  As she approached the passport control desk, Marmion turned one last time to wave to her family, waiting in a little cluster beyond the barrier that funnelled passengers towards the departure zone. Pip, Maggie, Becky and her parents, all of them here to see her off as though she was going for good, rather than just a few months. I’ll see you at Christmas, she’d said, and they’d smiled and hugged her – everything calmly managed, of course, with no embarrassing excesses of emotion, but even so their being there, their insistence on coming with her so early in the morning, touched her deeply. Especially, she thought, since – no use pretending – a little part of her was glad to be leaving them. Leaving the close, familiar embrace of her family, the house she’d grown up in, the weight of love that filled it, as well as leaving Cambridge and her friends. It was complicated, of course; that spark of impatience to begin the next chapter of her life was set against sadness and apprehension – but she felt certain that the spark would take, that the dry tinder of hope and expectation would burn brightly over the weeks and months to come.

  One thing troubled her still, and she hoped she would find it in herself, before long, to set it right. She was bidden to live at peace with the world, and she was not at peace with everyone in it. She had seen Stephen; she had written to Cressida and to Fay; but she had not settled things with Bill or Judith. She wasn’t ready to do that, to find the right words and to say them wholeheartedly, as she must – but that responsibility hung over her. Once she was in America, she thought, things would shift in her mind, in her heart. Another few days couldn’t matter.

  When she reached the departure gate, she squeezed into one of the last free seats, her hand baggage tucked against her knees. It seemed to her that she was already in a different world: a world populated by people more various even than those she had lived among in London. People of all ages, races, dress, expression, emotion. Opposite her sat a Scottish family with four small children who danced and chattered and tugged and argued while their parents remonstrated gently, and then less gently. To her right an elderly Indian couple waited patiently for the boarding instructions to be announced. On the other side a young man in Arab dress was absorbed in a book, his lips moving as he followed the words, and opposite him two American teenagers in short tartan skirts talked loudly about the excitements of their trip to London, watched by a boy a little older whose shaven head and tattoos made him seem, Marmion thought, vulnerable rather than tough. Further along the row of seats there was a woman with two tiny babies, a very old man with a shock of white hair and a Chinese woman in a black suit with bulky headphones clamped over her ears.

  All these stories, Marmion thought, some of them almost completed and others barely started. All these people, gathered at random, an almost perfect cross-section of humanity. She felt, sitting among them, draughts of love and of anger, of acceptance and of resistance, of hope and of despair – and she felt an answering surge inside her soul. Shine like a light in the darkness, she thought. Shine for the good of the world.

  Acknowledgements

  As ever, my greatest thanks go to my husband, Richard Pleming, for his unstinting succour and support and his boundless wit and good humour – all blessings daily renewed. Love and thanks also, once again, to my parents and my lovely children, who make life worth living.

  I’m ever grateful for the wise guidance and sanity of Joel Richardson at Bonnier Zaffre, and for the efforts of the rest of the team, especially Rebecca Farrell and Emily Burns. And of course for the marvellous Patrick Walsh, agent extraordinaire.

  Cordelia Hall not only read early drafts of this novel but provided expert legal advice – as did Esther Millard. Thank you to them both. Geoffrey and Diana Manning – and before them, John and Kate – sowed the seeds of my abiding affection for Cumbria by allowing us to stay in their cottage for many, many years. I’m hugely grateful to them and to all our friends in Patterdale, and apologise for the shameless way I’ve altered their beautiful landscape.

  This book is dedicated to the many friends with whom I sang in the chapel choir at Clare College, Cambridge between 1983 and 1986, but I would also like to thank everyone else with whom and for whom I’ve had the good fortune to sing over the last forty years or so – from the Messiah in the Albert Hall with the massed choirs of Buckinghamshire schools in 1978 to many memorable (and sometimes scary) concerts with various grown-up choirs in London and Oxford, and of course Bel Canto. These days my contact with choral music is mostly as a member of the congregation at Guildford Cathedral, and my final thanks go to the clergy and choir there – and especially to Daphne and Rowena – for bringing us such joy.

  About the Author

  Rachel Crowther trained as a doctor and worked in the NHS for twenty years, writing fiction on the side between babies and medical exams un
til her first novel was published after winning a competition. She has five children, two mad dogs and a kitten, and is also a keen musician and cook. This is her third novel.

  Also by Rachel Crowther

  The Things You Do For Love

  The Partridge and the Pelican

  If you enjoyed Every Secret Thing by Rachel Crowther, then you’ll love her novel

  An elite surgeon with a brilliant but philandering husband, Flora Macintyre has always defined herself by her success in juggling her career and her marriage. Until, all at once, she finds herself with neither.

  Retired and widowed in the space of a few months, Flora is left untethered. In a moment of madness, she realises there’s nothing to stop her running away to France.

  But back home her two daughters – the family she’s always loved, but never had the time to nurture – are struggling. Lou is balancing pregnancy with a crumbling relationship, while her younger sister, Kitty, begins to realise she may have to choose between love and her growing passion for music.

  And even as the family try to pull together, one dark secret could still tear them all apart . . .

  Read on for an exciting extract . . .

  OUT NOW IN PAPERBACK AND EBOOK

  March 1995

  As Flora drives away from the hospital, her mind is full of heroism. Waiting at the traffic lights, then heading out onto the dual carriageway, she relives the hours under the lights, the glint of instruments, the counting in of swabs – all the rites and pageantry of the operating theatre, brought to bear on the body of one ordinary citizen. She conjures up the face of her patient, a young man with a faint tinge of green in the hollows of his cheeks, being coaxed back to consciousness among the reassuring paraphernalia of drips and drains and monitors.

  And then she remembers the size of the tumour, the length of gut they had to remove, the bleakness of the prognosis. As the orderly lights of the ring road give way to unlit country lanes, Flora feels the adrenaline ebbing away. There is always this moment, this crunch of reality, when the elation of exercising her craft evaporates and the patient comes back into focus, a person with a life that has been interrupted by medical catastrophe. She never deceives herself about such things, but it’s necessary to put them away while you get on with the job, focussing on the gaping abdomen before you.