She couldn’t see Bill now as she had at the beginning, when she was first falling in love with him. When she looked at him now she felt his hands on her body, and a shivering awareness of all those intricacies of fleshly gratification that she couldn’t put into words but longed for as soon as she thought of them. Guilt wasn’t a Quaker sentiment – the idea was more to avoid it through care and principle – but even if it had been, Marmion couldn’t possibly have attached it to sex, which seemed to her a God-given wonder.
Their room was barely large enough for the double bed that was squeezed into it, and the choreography of undressing and seduction was awkward, accompanied by muffled laughter and occasional yelps. But encountering each other at unexpected angles, being pressed hip to hip in the doorway, added to the anticipation of what was to come rather than undermining it. When they were finally on the bed, Bill ran his hand down the length of Marmion’s body. Down in the village, the church clock chimed midnight, and the yearning ache in her belly seemed to resonate with the sound and the vivid awareness of her happiness.
September 2015
Bill
‘Have you checked the traffic?’ asked Isabel. ‘Won’t the M6 be awful on a Friday afternoon?’
Bill looked back at the house, a lingering glance, as though they were going away for a long time. He ran a checklist in his mind: doors, windows, alarm, timer lights.
‘I suppose there really isn’t any other route,’ Isabel persisted.
‘I checked just now,’ Bill said. ‘It looked pretty clear. We can keep an eye, on the TomTom.’
They didn’t usually talk like this, he thought. They were both speaking for the sake of it, not letting there be silence. He hoped things would settle down once they were under way: he didn’t think he could bear this for three hours, plus whatever bonus the Friday traffic added.
‘Got everything?’ he asked, and Isabel managed a smile.
‘Are you sure you want me to come?’ she asked.
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
The smile turned into something more complicated. ‘They’re your friends. I thought you might . . .’
‘I haven’t seen them for twenty years,’ Bill said. ‘Of course I want you to come.’ But she knew he didn’t, of course. Just as he knew she didn’t want to be left behind. That hardly scratched the surface of the situation, actually, but even so the rational part of his brain recognised the advantage of having Isabel there. Something about camouflage; about proving he was who he said he was these days. Something about ensuring civility, or whatever they were going to need to get through the weekend.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get going. The traffic will only get worse.’
They lived outside Shrewsbury, in a village with a number of old and beautiful houses and a number of not-so-old and not-so-beautiful houses. Theirs was one of the latter, but it was Edwardian rather than 1970s, plain and four-square, with more bedrooms than they needed and less garden than Isabel would have liked. It had appealed, ten years ago, largely because it had seemed like a lot of house for the money, and they could afford to buy it without a crippling mortgage. They’d been hoping to have children then, to fill the bedrooms and make the less appealing aspects less important. As the prospect of children dwindled, they thought about moving – into the middle of Shrewsbury, perhaps – but for a while superstition prevented them, and then inertia took over. Instead they made other, more tentative, changes. The conservatory, the Aga; this year the new car. Bill wasn’t sure why it made him feel edgy to think about the costs and the benefits now, when the money was long gone. The Midlander’s natural thrift, he supposed, perhaps exaggerated by his illness. Although some people became less circumspect after an episode like that: some people threw caution to the wind once they’d got a whiff of mortality.
He smiled at Isabel now, as they joined a light stream of traffic heading east on the M54. It was a clear afternoon, and the wooded slopes of the Wrekin stood out sharply in the middle distance.
‘Where is it exactly, the house?’ Isabel had got the map book out.
‘Griseley,’ he said. ‘Near the bottom of Ullswater.’
Out of the corner of his eye he watched her finger tracing the lines of roads and fells.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Gosh, it looks like the middle of nowhere.’
‘There’s a pub and a church and a shop,’ said Bill. ‘A shop that sells everything. Or there used to be.’ It would all have changed, he told himself. It would look very different to how he remembered. Not that he remembered much: he’d worked at that. Only oddments remained, things he hadn’t erased because he hadn’t thought of them for years. The cuckoo clock in the hall that had a mind of its own, and those bloody awful parlour games.
Isabel said nothing for several minutes. She was a sensible person, Bill thought, and sensitive in a way that wasn’t wholly self-centred. Those were among the things that had appealed to him about her, and he’d been grateful for them over the years, especially during the protracted saga of not-having-children, and then his being ill. He hadn’t married her for the right reasons, and the wrong reasons hadn’t transmogrified over time into better ones: he hadn’t managed, as he’d hoped, to cultivate ardour, although she’d never had cause to doubt his fidelity. But she knew there was something more to this weekend, to the reconvening of his Cambridge friends, than he’d told her. She held out until they were approaching Wolverhampton, and then she said: ‘So this woman, the one who’s left the house to you. Did she teach you at St Anne’s?’
‘No.’ Bill hesitated. ‘She was connected to the college,’ he said, ‘and she took an interest in the chapel choir, particularly the five of us in my year. She used to invite us to her house, take us to concerts, things like that. And at the end of our last term we went to stay at her cottage in the Lake District.’
‘This cottage.’
‘Yes.’ He waited, and so did Isabel. ‘I hadn’t seen her for years,’ he said. ‘I didn’t stay in touch.’
‘So why did she leave the house to you?’
‘Not just to me,’ said Bill. ‘To all of us. I have no idea. I expect the solicitor will explain.’
Isabel nodded. They were between motorways now, passing the turnings to Coven and Brewood, territory familiar from years ago, when he was growing up on the outskirts of Birmingham. It was odd, Bill thought, that life could land you up so close to where you’d started.
*
Isabel’s fears about the Friday traffic proved unfounded. There were plenty of cars on the road but no accidents, no roadworks, and they kept moving steadily northwards. By six o’clock they were turning off the M6 on the South Lakes exit.
Isabel had dozed off somewhere around Charnock Richard, and Bill handled the car gently, glad not to have to talk during this last stretch. The past was seeping inexorably into his mind now, and a churn of anticipation filled his belly. It wasn’t just Fay he hadn’t seen for years. Guiltily, in quiet moments at work, he’d googled them all: it was easy enough to track people down these days.
Stephen Evans was a common name, but Bill was pretty sure he’d found the right one. A rather slight Internet footprint, but Bill suspected that was deliberate, and that it concealed a substantial life. Nothing on Facebook or LinkedIn, but a thread drawing together various mentions of his name: the Arabic connection was a clue, and the patronage of a charity that cared for adults with severe disabil-ities. Bill had been pleased with himself for remembering Stephen’s brother, the other adopted son who had cerebral palsy. Stephen’s interests seemed to span both business and academic life: boards of directors, honorary degrees, the text of an occasional lecture. A good deal of money, Bill thought. A lot of influence, certainly. No mention of a family, even a wife, but that might be a deliberate smokescreen. Bill tried to imagine Stephen’s wife and came up with someone blonde and glossy, expensively dressed.
Judith had been easy to find, her face gazing out – as his did – from her professional website. Her chamb
ers specialised in criminal law and she did a lot of legal aid work. There was a streaking of grey in Judith’s hair, but she’d changed remarkably little. That smile, that confidence, he remembered all too well. Truth to tell, he’d googled Judith before, more than once over the last . . . well, since Google had been around to make it easy to find your old friends. To stalk them; that was what it was called. He’d watched her not looking any older as the photographs changed and she advanced steadily in the particular corner of the law she’d chosen. Judith was on Facebook, but her profile was private, and he didn’t dare make contact directly. But there’d been an exchange of emails over the last few weeks. Careful, guarded group emails, about the practicalities. He’d read Judith’s messages over and over again, hearing her voice, and trying out different inflections, different emphases. Eventually he’d deleted them, frightened of giving himself away.
They were through Windermere now, on the road that led up to the Kirkstone Pass. Bill didn’t remember which way they’d come last time. Fay had driven, although Judith had had a car in Cambridge that last year, in contravention of university regulations. She’d kept it at Fay’s house, Bill remembered. It was odd what stayed with you and what didn’t. Tiny details lodged vividly – a gooseberry fool they’d eaten one evening in the garden on Clarendon Way – while whole swathes had fallen away. It had been a Golf, Judith’s car. An old blue Golf, a shade that would be called teal now. Not so much a sign of wealth as an assertion of independence.
Cressida had been easy to find too. She’d done exactly what she’d intended: she held a university lectureship in the English Faculty, and was a fellow of St Anne’s. He’d found a picture of her on the college website, a slightly blurry photo that seemed, oddly, to have been taken on a beach. He wasn’t sure he’d have recognised her. Her hair was short, her face thinner, and she looked very serious – as befitted an academic, but not one photographed on a beach. She’d always been serious, though. Bill remembered her wearing the frilly white blouse she used to sing in, explaining some point of pronunciation. Did she have a husband, a family? It was odd knowing about the professional lives of all these other people, his old friends, but nothing about their personal lives. Their emails had avoided that territory.
Isabel was still asleep, her head tipped to one side and her mouth slightly open. Her face looked less lined than it did when she was awake, but there was a hint of dissatisfaction in her expression that she tried hard to hide, most of the time. Well, she had as much reason as most people to be dissatisfied, he thought.
The view from the car windows was getting exciting now, glimpses of fells appearing between the trees. As they passed through Troutbeck, the world opened up suddenly, and he slowed, dazed by the drama of the landscape and the sudden explosion of memory.
June 1995
Marmion
‘I never thought I could eat so much in a single weekend,’ said Cressida. ‘We’d have to climb a thousand fells to make up for it.’
She was sprawled – a rather un-Cressida-like pose – on a rug Fay had produced from one of the knapsacks.
‘I’d almost be prepared to climb that hill again for another brownie,’ said Judith. Cressida leant across and passed her one, and Judith feigned hesitation before taking it. ‘Too good for words,’ she said. ‘Really too good.’
Fay was sitting upright at the edge of the rug, and the others were scattered across the grass or perched on the flattish boulders that ringed the level space they’d chosen for the picnic. There was a view of the lake far below, with a steamer meandering across it, and closer at hand a stream to paddle in, if they felt like it, after lunch. Which Marmion thought she would, in due course, but just now sitting back to back with Bill on a ledge of stone was much too nice for her to consider moving.
‘This is lovely,’ she said, to no one in particular, and Fay smiled approvingly.
‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘I hoped you’d like it here. I’m glad you could all come up before you leave St Anne’s.’
‘I’m not leaving,’ said Cressida. ‘If my results are OK, I’m definitely staying on.’
‘To do a PhD?’ asked Fay.
Cressida nodded as well as she could, propped on one elbow. ‘MPhil to start with, then a PhD, I hope.’
‘What about the rest of you?’ Fay asked. ‘I know Marmion and Bill are going to the Guildhall to sing.’
‘Bar school for me,’ said Judith. ‘Another year of hard slog.’
‘And you, Stephen?’
Stephen hadn’t stirred from his supine position, but he opened his eyes now and turned his head towards them. None of them knew what Stephen’s plans were, Marmion realised.
‘I’m going abroad,’ he said. ‘I’m going to learn Arabic in Dubai.’
‘Are you really?’ Everyone was looking at him: Judith spoke for all of them. ‘You’re an international man of mystery, Stephen.’
Stephen raised an eyebrow. ‘I always was a linguist,’ he said.
He had indeed started out reading modern languages, before switching to social and political science – to avoid going abroad for a year, Marmion had thought at the time. It struck her now that it was rather presumptuous to assume that staying in synch with the rest of them mattered enough to make Stephen change course.
‘And after that?’ Fay asked. ‘Where will you all be in ten years’ time?’
Marmion was suddenly acutely aware of Bill’s back behind her. She couldn’t tell whether the stiffening she could feel was in his muscles or hers.
‘Still in Cambridge, I hope,’ said Cressida. ‘Enjoying glowing reviews of my definitive work on Southey. Teaching tiresome undergraduates.’
‘Working my way up the criminal bar,’ said Judith. ‘If all goes well.’
‘I think you’ll end up in Parliament,’ said Cressida. ‘You’ve got all the right credentials.’
‘Except a passing interest in politics,’ said Judith. ‘Stephen’s your man for that. Do you know Stephen has read the complete works of Karl Marx?’
‘Not for fun,’ said Stephen.
‘Stephen’s going to run the United Nations,’ said Bill.
Stephen shut his eyes as the sun came out from behind a cloud. ‘Only if I can do it from here,’ he said. ‘I don’t ever want to leave this spot.’
Fay turned to look at him now, her face glowing. How touching, Marmion thought: she badly wants us to like it here. That’s what it’s been about, the fussing over food and making sure we go on the right walks and all that.
‘You’ll go far, Stephen,’ Fay said. ‘I’m sure of that.’
‘Won’t we all?’ asked Judith – and then there was a sudden silence. Judith had hit the wrong note, producing her would-be barrister tone in the middle of a conversation that had been too gentle and ambling for it, but that wasn’t it, Marmion thought. It was as though they believed Fay had some power to see the future and were waiting for her to pronounce. For a few seconds everything froze, Marmion’s heart beating too fast for comfort. When Stephen started speaking she felt a rush of gratitude to him.
‘You will, Judith,’ he said. ‘I’m in no doubt about the illustrious career of Judith Malik, QC. And so will Professor Benham, world expert on Romantic poetry. And Marmion and Bill will be on stage together at La Scala.’
Marmion laughed, doubly grateful to him now for managing a sentence which linked her to Bill while sidestepping the question of whether they would be together, ten years hence, in any other sense. Half of her wished someone would say something about a string of little Marmions and Bills waiting in the dressing room, and half of her dreaded being put on the spot like that. Bill being put on the spot, that is: she certainly wouldn’t have any hesitation. So then . . .
She collected herself. Bad, bad, to let her hopes run away with her, and silly to worry about Bill, when he’d given her no cause. She leant her head back now and rested it on his shoulder, to show she was at ease. There. Perfection. Bliss.
*
I
t surprised Stephen to hear himself speaking with such conviction about Dubai. He’d left for Cumbria uncertain about the offer he’d just accepted, but somehow, without him noticing, the last few days had cemented things in his mind. Suddenly he could see the future quite clearly: he could see Dubai as the first of a string of beacons stretching away across a landscape that was entirely his to explore and to conquer.
But the other thing he’d said was true too – that just now he could imagine abandoning that plan and staying here. Here in Cumbria, and among his friends. He wasn’t sure how those two things fitted together, the looking forward and the looking back, but . . . maybe it was partly that he could afford to feel nostalgic, now that things were settled. He could let himself feel how much these last three years had meant. The music, and the friendships: all of it so unlike what he’d imagined.
Before he went to university he’d never come across the sacred music they sang in chapel. It was chance that led him to audition for the choir: the boy in the room next door, a second-year choral scholar, had heard him singing in the shower and told him there was a vacancy for a bass, if he was interested. If Stephen had known more about it, he might have laughed off the suggestion. He’d had no musical training, and the standard was very high – but he was cheerfully ignorant of that, and in any case the technicalities of acquiring a new skill had never daunted him. He was a linguist, and what was music but another language to learn?
Except that it had turned out to be more than that. It had been, analysed objectively, a transformative experience – but there was nothing objective about the way it had taken hold of him, the way it made him feel his heart was beating properly for the first time and filled his mind with echoes of meaning and possibility and yearning. He wasn’t the same kind of person as Bill, or even Marmion, but for the last three years he’d become one of them.
Every Secret Thing Page 5