Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  But then there were footsteps, voices, too close, and a sharp exclamation – Fay’s voice, then Stephen’s – and Judith jerked away from him.

  And after that it wasn’t the world at their feet but something giving way beneath them, a lurching and clutching and a frantic tumble, and Judith was falling, falling, her body slithering and somersaulting over the rocks, and he was screaming into the emptiness – ‘Oh my God, Judith!’ – and hearing the echo of his voice from miles and miles away.

  *

  Cressida had stopped on the path just ahead of Marmion.

  ‘Look!’ she said.

  Marmion lifted her eyes and felt her spirits fly. They could see for miles now, right down the valley and into the next one. Ullswater lay far below, an elongated silvery S shape like a mirror carefully cut to fit between the fells.

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ she said, and Cressida smiled at her pleasure.

  ‘How’s the leg?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine. A souvenir.’

  ‘It can’t be far now. We’re so high up already.’

  ‘Let’s hope.’

  ‘We’ll look back on this and be pleased,’ Cressida said. ‘I’m sure we will.’

  But just then, a little way off, they heard a scream, a scrabble of rocks, and a voice shouting.

  ‘Judith! Oh my God, Judith!’

  Marmion’s heart curdled. Bill’s voice. Judith falling.

  She and Cressida rushed on up the path. As they came round the next corner, the scene was laid out for them, their friends arranged like a stick-figure diagram describing an accident unfolding. Judith was out of sight, but Bill was slithering down the slope, Stephen close behind. A little way above them Fay stood stock still, looking down. Cressida veered off from the path, and Marmion forced herself to follow. Her legs were numb with fear and exhaustion, hardly capable of moving.

  Judith was lying spread-eagled among a slide of rocks. She was very still, and one leg was bent at a terrible angle. Marmion couldn’t tell whether she had shouted before – couldn’t remember any sounds at all since that first cry of Bill’s – but now she heard her voice as part of a sudden cacophony.

  Oh God . . . leg must be broken . . . unconscious . . . what should we . . .

  Then the cacophony seemed to fade again, exactly as if someone had turned a dial, and above it Cressida’s voice rose shrilly, almost in triumph: ‘I knew it. I knew something was going on.’

  The fells, the aching muscles, everything extraneous about the scene was suddenly shrouded by a kind of mist. What Marmion could see was Judith lying on the ground, her dark hair scattered like an aureole and a piece of heather clutched in her hand. She could see Bill kneeling beside her, his face racked with despair – and Fay standing over them now, looking with terrible compassion towards Marmion.

  Bill

  2008

  Bill has a recurring dream that he is standing beside his own grave. The grave always looks the same, a plain stone with his name carved on it but nothing else: no dates, no consoling line of scripture. William Matthew Devenish.

  Although the grave is a constant, and there’s that odd sense of recognition that alerts you to the return of a dream you know, the circumstances change – the location and the storyline and the dramatis personae. Sometimes it’s set on a clifftop, sometimes deep in the woods, sometimes in a country churchyard at the height of summer. Sometimes Bill is trying to get everyone to come and look at something, and doesn’t realise until the last minute that it’s his grave – although there’s always, then, that sneaking feeling that he ought to have known, must have remembered where he was going. Sometimes he’s busy with something – reading a book, or laying out a picnic – and the grave just happens to be nearby, as though it’s always there, always in the background, so that he’d glimpse it if he happened to turn his head in the right direction.

  It was a while before Marmion first appeared in the dream, and when she did – when she does – she’s always happy to see him. He remembers her warmth, her openness; it’s a wonderful relief to see her. Tonight she had a baby in her arms, and she wanted to show it to him, wanted him to hold it. When he wakes up, he can still feel the weight of it in his arms.

  It’s very dark in the bedroom: the dream must have woken him hours before the alarm. He’s cross with himself – he’d have liked to stay longer, holding the baby. He hardly saw its face. But then he understands that something else has roused him. The bed is soaked, as though someone’s poured a jug of warm water over him. Isabel is fast asleep, curled on her side of the bed. He can feel his bladder, uncomfortably full, so he knows it’s not that, at least. When he stands up, he realises that even his hair is wet. He shivers, and stumbles through to the bathroom. As he fumbles with the opening of his pyjamas, he feels something in his groin: something like a small marble, just under his skin.

  *

  The news is as good as it can be: it’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the highly treatable kind. Given his age and stage, there’s an eighty-five per cent five-year survival rate. It’s a sign of how his perspective has changed in the last week that a fifteen per cent chance of dying seems like good news.

  They’d been just about to embark on their last cycle of IVF, he and Isabel. They’ve been paying for the treatment themselves, laying out a small fortune in pursuit of parenthood. Isabel is a few years older than him, approaching forty, and at her age, they both know, the chances are slim – not far off his fifteen per cent, in fact – but fifteen is a lot more than nothing. On both counts, fifteen is a lot more than nothing. At least they don’t have to pay for his treatment, he thinks, but he doesn’t say that to Isabel. Instead, he takes her out to dinner, the night before his first dose of chemotherapy, and apologises. He can’t get the image of Marmion’s baby, the dream baby, out of his head while he’s speaking. Maybe Isabel can see it too, glimpse some trace of it in his eyes, because she looks horrified.

  ‘You don’t have to apologise,’ she says. ‘What do you have to apologise for?’

  ‘I’ve let you down,’ he says. ‘It might have been our turn to be lucky. We’ll never know now.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she says. ‘Do you think I’d rather have a baby, or keep you?’

  He’s surprised by this: the question hadn’t occurred to him, but if it had, he’d have guessed it would be a pretty close call. He ought to feel touched, but instead he’s slightly alarmed.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I rather hoped you’d be able to have both.’

  ‘We can adopt,’ she says. She looks pretty tonight, her face flushed in a way that suits her, but she’s wearing a dress that doesn’t. A sort of tawny colour, with a pattern of leaves. Bill isn’t sure they’ll be allowed to adopt – not until he’s in the clear, and by then they might be too old – but he nods and smiles, feeling an unexpected tenderness for her. It’s the dress, he thinks, that makes him feel protective. It’s the wrong colour for her; it looks as though she’s borrowed it from someone else, having admired it on them. Poor Isabel, ending up with all the wrong things, making all those well-meaning decisions that turn out to be so misguided. She shouldn’t have turned down the ENO chorus a few years back. That might have been a launch pad for her, even if it meant living apart for a while. The bookings for local choral societies, the bit of teaching in a local school, are less than she deserves. Even the hobbies she takes up don’t seem to stick: watercolours one term, quilting the next.

  ‘What are you going to eat?’ he asks. He’s not hungry, but he scans the menu in search of something he could manage. Soup, perhaps. A cliché of the sick.

  *

  The treatment isn’t as bad as he expected. It’s a very individual thing, the oncologist tells him: some people tolerate it better than others. He’s off work for a few weeks, and the weather is good (it’s May, but a balmy sort of May), so he takes himself out for walks.

  Everyone reminded him, when they moved back up here, how beautiful Shropshire was. They quoted Housman, and he th
ought of Vaughan Williams. He imagined walking a lot, looking down from Wenlock Edge and scaling the Wrekin, but somehow that hasn’t happened. Isabel likes Attingham Park, the three-mile circuit of the deer park and picking blackberries or elderflower along the riverbank, and they haven’t ventured much further. He can’t think, now, what they have filled their weekends with all these years, but there never seems to be time for a proper walk, the kind that gets you miles from anywhere so that the world looks different, less safe, more filled with possibility.

  He has to be careful, of course; he doesn’t want to exhaust himself while his body’s fighting this thing, but he feels sure that the air over the hills is good for him. Isabel doesn’t come with him the first time, and he doesn’t press her after that. He’s happy striding alone across the top of the Long Mynd, like the great broad back of a whale, or following the stream up through Carding Mill Valley. Sometimes he has conversations with Isabel in his head while he walks, and he can’t help feeling they go better without her there.

  One morning, though, his father drives out from Birmingham to join him. They meet in Ironbridge and follow a circular trail through Jackfield and Broseley and Coalbrookdale. Remnants of the Industrial Revolution are everywhere in this part of the Severn Valley, a story of progress and misery for humankind preserved now in a group of museums and in factories converted to luxury flats. His father scrupulously avoids any discussion of the cancer and talks instead about Bill’s nieces, who are fourteen now and no less worrying to their grandparents than they were during those anxious weeks they spent in the Special Care Baby Unit.

  ‘They’re nice girls,’ he says. ‘Get either of them on their own and they’re nice girls, but the arguments . . .’

  Bill nods. He’s a little out of breath, but he doesn’t want to confess that to his father. This outing is meant to reassure him.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what they find to fight about,’ his father continues. ‘Clothes, CDs, I don’t know. If they spent half that time on their school work . . .’ He glances at Bill. ‘We never thought they’d stay all this time. Not that we don’t love having them, but it’s hard on your mother, having a house full of teenagers again.’

  Bill considers this. He hardly knows anything about Mia or Grace. He’s always told himself it’s difficult for Isabel, being faced with the evidence of Mandy’s immoderate fertility, but he knows that’s not the only reason he’s detached himself from his family. He’s on the point of saying something bland and sympathetic when his father stops suddenly.

  ‘There,’ he says, pointing. Below them there’s a view of the gorge, the curve of the Severn flanked by thickly wooded slopes and the famous iron bridge spanning it. The little town clusters on the far side, prettily haphazard and thronged, these days, with tea rooms and gift shops rather than workers’ cottages.

  ‘Beautiful,’ says Bill. It is an arresting panorama, the bridge at the centre of it almost too delicate, too decorative, to be a symbol of industrial might – but he’s not sure whether that’s what his father sees. It seems to him suddenly that the story of this place, its brave hopes and past glories, the quenching of its furnaces and prettification of its history, is too poignant for them both.

  ‘You know there’s another bridge beneath the river,’ his father says. ‘The other half of the circle.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The gorge is narrowing,’ his father says. ‘The bridge was being squeezed from each side. So back in the seventies they built a matching arch, upside down, to strengthen it.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘You wouldn’t guess, would you?’ His father shoots him a smile. ‘You’d never know it took all that labour to keep it in one piece.’

  *

  There are some blessings over the next few months. Bill makes good progress, his cancer maintaining an orderly retreat. He can tell, every time he sees the doctors, what a relief it is for them to have a patient they can give good news to. When he goes back to work, the senior partner calls him into his office and says encouraging things about his career. And Isabel has a lucky break: a last-minute call to step in as soprano soloist in a Haydn Mass at the Proms, and on the back of that a couple more bookings for gigs in London of a higher calibre than she’s had lately. As Christmas approaches, Bill tells himself that they’ve turned a corner. He comes out of work one evening into the winter darkness and smells smoke and pine needles on the cold air. Shrewsbury looks pretty with its streets lit up, and a faint draught of carol singing filters down the hill.

  On a whim, he turns left towards the town centre rather than right into the office car park, following the direction of the music – which leads him, as he expects, to the shop just off the market square that sells CDs and art materials as well as books. He doesn’t think they have any CDs of Christmas carols at home. Perhaps the shop will sell him some decorations too, something newer and shinier than the plastic wreath and sagging paper stars they hang up every year. He imagines adorning the house, filling it with music for Isabel’s return. Perhaps he could cook something that would smell warm and festive, gingerbread or mulled wine or mince pies.

  Then just as he turns into the shop, a new track starts. A solo voice this time, rather than a choir, singing one of the movements from Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’. It’s unmistakably a female voice, not a boy treble, but even so it’s a pure, clear sound.

  That yongë child when it gan weep

  With song she lulled him asleep

  That was so sweet a melody

  It passèd alle minstrelsy.

  He hasn’t dreamt of Marmion since the summer, but now he sees again the image of her holding the baby, her face alight with pleasure. The baby has her hair, a shimmer of dark copper over its soft head.

  But the voice, he thinks; that isn’t Marmion’s voice, it’s Judith’s.

  He turns on his heel and hurries back down the hill, hot with confusion and desire. Judith hasn’t entered his dreams for years. He’s thought of her, though – of course he’s thought of her. Judith whose voice was the sweetest, for all her fieriness. Judith whose eyes flashed a witty retort faster than her tongue. Judith naked in his room, bold and slender as a sunflower.

  His hands are trembling as he pulls out of the car park and follows the familiar route out of town. The winding streets give way to the tangle of dual carriageways that surround Shrewsbury, and then the flash of street lights ceases and he’s on a country lane, heading deep into the countryside towards their village. He must be mistaken, he tells himself. That can’t be the recording they made at St Anne’s – oh, fifteen years ago. Surely like the dreams, like the night sweats, there’s a twist there he’s been taken in by, a hole in the sequence of assumptions. It’s all in his mind, he tells himself; but he knows that’s the problem.

  The house is in darkness when he arrives. Isabel isn’t due back yet; that’s why he thought of . . . That image of stars and carols and gingerbread seems a million miles away. All he can see now is the awkward, over-large house, its blank windows reproachful. Some of the bedrooms have started to smell like the unused rooms in old people’s houses, with that slight sighing shift of sequestered air when you open the door on them. Bill wonders how they could ever have imagined this house full of children.

  He’s still sitting in the drive when another set of headlights looms round the corner and swings off the road to park beside him. He hears the crunch and slam of the car door, and then Isabel’s footsteps. She’s almost at the front door when she stops. Turning his head, he sees her looking straight at him.

  ‘Bill?’

  She comes back towards the car and opens the driver’s door.

  ‘My God, you gave me a fright. What are you doing there?’

  ‘I’ve just got back,’ he lies. ‘Just a few moments ago. I was thinking something through.’

  She smiles. ‘A work thing? Forget about it now. Come inside: it’s cold out here.’

  ‘OK.’

  She turns, and go
es on ahead of him into the house. He watches the downstairs windows lighting up, one by one, some shining bright white and some paler and yellowish with light that percolates through from other rooms. He sees Isabel coming towards the sitting room window to pull the curtains across, and then silhouetted in the kitchen window, filling the kettle at the sink.

  So what is he going to do? he wonders. Leave Isabel to fill the whole house by herself? For what – the stab of an old wound? The weariness of surviving disaster?

  He climbs out of the car and follows his wife into the house. For a fleeting moment he savours the surprise of seeing the interior afresh, as though he’s been away for a long time. But almost before he can grasp at the feeling, and the insight it brings, everything settles back into its usual form. From the kitchen doorway he can hear the hiss of the kettle and the hum of the oven, the clatter of crockery as Isabel delves into the cupboard. When she sees him, she straightens up and comes towards him.

  ‘My poor Bill,’ she says. Her tone is unfamiliar, as though whatever he has been through has communicated itself to her, but she doesn’t look frightened. She puts her arms around him and pulls him in close. He can smell the cold air still in her hair, and a trace of her perfume.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he says. ‘I’m all right.’

  Part III

  September 2015

  Bill

  High Scarp was both as Bill remembered it and not. The approach, up a steep and rather narrow track, called up at once the memory of that first arrival, and the grey stone walls and white window frames were just as he would have described them. But the architecture looked different, somehow; the way it fitted into the hillside. Certainly some of the trees had grown: the house was more overshadowed now, half buried in a canopy of branches.

  ‘Wow,’ said Isabel, as he turned off the engine. ‘It’s bigger than I imagined. Look at all that garden.’