Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  Shutting his eyes again, he examined his state of mind cautiously. The things he ought to feel and the things he did feel had a way of flitting from one camp to another which made it hard to take an inventory. Shame and distress, yes: but was it shame for what he’d done, or what he wanted to do now – or even what he absolutely didn’t want to do? And distress distributed in the wrong proportions between Judith and Marmion and himself.

  He groaned, hiding his face in the pillow. Stephen had offered Marmion his room last night and Bill had been grateful, more than grateful, hoping it would be easier to face Marmion in the morning. He knew now that that had been a vain hope – but he also knew that he couldn’t put it off any longer.

  Marmion was alone in the sitting room when he appeared. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, but neither did she meet his eyes. She was sitting by the fireplace with a cup of tea.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning.’ She picked up her teacup – an ordinary gesture, but it wrenched at his conscience that she should feel in need of that kind of cover. ‘There’s a pot in the kitchen if you want some.’

  Bill could have done with a cup of tea, but he knew he couldn’t leave the room again. He stood looking at her, wondering what to say.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I’m OK,’ Marmion said. ‘Better than Judith, I expect.’ She hesitated, still not looking at him. ‘What’s going on, Bill?’

  Bill came closer, perching on the arm of the chair opposite her. A mistake: too deliberately temporary, as though he might flit off at any moment. Marmion was looking down at her hands now, waiting for an answer.

  ‘That’s not entirely clear,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Certainly not to me,’ Marmion said.

  ‘No.’ Bloody hell, this was impossible. It was no use trying to be reasonable, no way to explain in terms she’d understand. Everywhere he looked there were clichés. ‘Marmion, I . . . it isn’t quite how it looks.’

  ‘What does it look like, would you say?’ He had never heard her voice so crisp. His spirits rallied a little in the face of her self-possession.

  ‘I suppose it looks as though Judith and I have been having a – fling,’ he said. ‘In fact we –’

  ‘I’m not really interested in the details,’ Marmion said. ‘In fact, I’m not sure I want to know any of them. I’m more concerned about the – about your feelings, Bill.’

  ‘Yes.’ He moved down into the seat of the armchair. Better, he thought: more steady and responsible. But might it look as though he was edging towards staying put; staying with her?

  ‘I don’t know if this will make any sense to you,’ he said, ‘but my feelings for you are – they haven’t changed, but it’s as though the world has changed around them. I can’t – that’s the only way I can explain it.’

  ‘You make me sound like a soft toy,’ Marmion said. There was a wobble in her voice that ought to have called up pity and protection, but instead it irritated him. Don’t be silly, he wanted to say – but wasn’t that exactly how it was? He’d outgrown her; outgrown their romance. He couldn’t have anticipated that, but it had happened.

  ‘Marmion,’ he began, and at the same time she said, ‘And I suppose Judith is in love with you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bill said. He could see that in Marmion’s eyes, being betrayed for anything less than insurmountable passion made things worse, but he couldn’t bring himself to make any claim for Judith’s feelings – or even his own. ‘It was . . . Hardly anything has happened,’ he said. Not that that was strictly true. ‘It’s – it was – just beginning.’

  ‘But the world has changed already,’ Marmion said. ‘The world has changed around me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The words sounded cheap and inadequate. Bill looked at her, wondering what more he could say, what balm or rationalisation or defence he could offer, but there was nothing.

  ‘Well,’ Marmion said eventually, ‘I’m going for a walk. I’ll see you later.’

  *

  There was no one else in the house, Bill discovered, and Fay’s car had gone too. Perhaps she’d taken Stephen and Cressida back to the hospital.

  Replaying his encounter with Marmion as he made himself toast and coffee, he was less and less certain how he’d left things; what she had understood. I’ll see you later. Was she expecting to pick up the conversation when she got back, then? He really couldn’t bear that idea. He took his breakfast over to the cabin, grateful to have that refuge – but as soon as he came through the door, Marmion’s belongings confronted him. Her concert dress hung from a hook, black and shiny like a skin shed by a selkie.

  Bill sank down on the bed, paralysed by a sense of self-loathing that felt both deserved and disproportionate. God, this was a nightmare. But wasn’t it just the sort of thing that was bound to happen to him, this fatal mixture of minor transgression and bad luck? Wasn’t it exactly what a Devenish should expect? His family had always been at the mercy of fortune, from Birmingham’s decline sending the hotel steadily downmarket to Mandy’s pregnancy – another perfectly ordinary event whose consequences had been dismayingly, unluckily worse than anyone could have expected. He imagined Fate laughing at his cheerful hope of escaping his birthright. He wasn’t like Judith: she was in charge of her own destiny. That was part of her allure, that sense that he could catch hold of her coat-tails and fly far, far away from the constraints and expectations of the world. But there was a reason why the Devenishes were downtrodden and moth-eaten and defeated by life; why they were so wary of risk and hubris.

  The windows of the cabin were small, and set high in the wall. Through them Bill could see the sky, a blank, bland blue today. Was he going to give in, then? Abandon the unattainable prize and settle for a life of safety and decency? He thought of his grandfathers, the hard-working owners of two modest businesses. He thought of his father, who had encouraged his music-making and watched with pride and apprehension as Bill made his way to Cambridge on a choral scholarship. It wasn’t a mire he’d scrambled out of, and he hadn’t done it single-handedly, but . . . He’d begun to believe his life would be different from theirs, Bill thought. And – dammit – maybe it still would. Wallowing in gloom and self-pity wasn’t the response of a survivor: of someone worthy of Judith. No, he mustn’t give in. If he could get through the next few days, the next few weeks, surely things would come out all right.

  He stirred himself then. Packing his clothes hastily into his duffle bag, he left it just inside the door, so he’d be ready to leave as soon as Fay said the word. As he crossed the garden again, he heard a car turning into the drive. Slipping into the sitting room, he took a book from the shelf and settled into an armchair, as though he had been sitting there peacefully all morning.

  June 1995

  Judith

  When Judith woke again, the conversation with Cressida and Stephen had been filed among the other garish, distorted memories in her head. The hospital room was empty and the window was black, although a low light had been left on beside her bed. A tray of food had been left for her too – an unappealing-looking sandwich, covered in cling film, and a bowl of what might be soup or some indeterminate dessert. Judith was hungry, but the effort of reaching over for the food didn’t seem worth it. She might go back to sleep, she thought – but while she waited to see whether that would happen, she took the packaged memories in her mind down from their shelves one by one and examined them again.

  She had fallen, on a walk, and banged her head. Bill had rushed to her side (that phrase seemed settled; it was part of the story). Marmion had realised something was going on between Bill and Judith. Even so, she’d come to visit Judith in hospital, where the helicopter had brought her. Cressida was angry with Judith and Bill. Stephen was angry with Cressida. And Bill: had Bill been to see her?

  Judith felt a pang of queasiness. Perhaps she should eat the sandwich. Perhaps she should call a nurse. There was a red button s
he could press: somehow she knew that. If Marmion had visited her, perhaps she wasn’t as angry as Cressida thought. Marmion was good at forgiving people. Perhaps it would turn out to be a good thing, this fall and Marmion finding out. Judith closed her eyes again, pleased with that resolution. It was night-time, she thought; she ought to sleep.

  *

  In the morning the world was back to normal, and the dream sequence of the last few days had faded to ordinary workaday colours. The room was full of people, but Judith didn’t recognise any of them. A woman in a white coat smiled.

  ‘Ah, good: you’re awake. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better,’ said Judith. That seemed safe, and she thought it was true.

  ‘Can we have a look at you?’ the woman asked. The badge on her coat informed Judith that she was Dr Elizabeth Harrison.

  Judith tried to nod, but it was a false economy, more painful than speech. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Dr Harrison stepped back, and a younger woman came forward, someone not much older than Judith. Her badge said Miss R. Budd, Medical Student.

  ‘I’m going to shine a light in your eyes,’ she said.

  Judith heard a clucking sound, and the young woman halted and turned.

  ‘Well, no; carry on now you’ve started. Do the neurological examination first.’

  Dr Harrison smiled reassuringly at Judith over the student’s head, and a bright light, horribly painful, pulsed into her eyes.

  The next ten minutes reminded Judith of a dog being taught to do tricks – follow a finger with your eyes, jerk your leg when your knee is tapped – and like a dog being trained, she was required to repeat her performance several times for the benefit of the whole group of medical students. In the course of all this she discovered that her leg had a metal plate in it and that she had a considerable amount of what the students referred to as cerebral contusion, but that none of them, to their evident disappointment, could find anything wrong with her brain.

  At the end of it all Dr Harrison sat down on the chair next to the bed, as though recalling her bedside manner at the last minute.

  ‘How are you feeling in yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘My head hurts,’ said Judith.

  The doctor smiled. ‘We can give you something for that. Is there someone to look after you?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At home. When we let you go.’

  It occurred to Judith then that she had no idea where she was, in which hospital or which town, but she thought that if she asked now they might think twice about releasing her, and she didn’t want to stay in this room any longer than she had to.

  ‘My parents are both doctors,’ she said. Perhaps she should have produced this fact earlier: it might have saved her from the medical students.

  ‘Excellent. Are they here?’

  ‘They’re in Bristol,’ said Judith, but then – and this made her realise that she wasn’t quite better yet, that things weren’t quite back to normal – the door opened and there was her mother, taking in the pack of students with a swift glance.

  September 2015

  Judith

  Judith was regretting staking a claim to Fay’s bedroom earlier in the evening. She’d wanted to avoid the room she’d had last time, for reasons that were at once obvious and strangely obscure, but she didn’t even like this room very much, now she was in it. The scent of possession hung over it, the accretion of decades of occupation. She recognised Fay’s hairbrush lying on the dressing table, and the well-dubbined walking boots in the bottom of the wardrobe. Everything was neat and recently dusted, but even so the place felt musty, stagnant, forgotten. As though it knew Fay was dead, Judith thought. As thought it knew they were interlopers, their occupation of the house unwarranted.

  Damn, damn, damn. She could tell she wouldn’t sleep well, and that tomorrow would be worse than this evening. Why had she come? There was no explanation apart from greed (and she had, frankly, no great interest in owning a share of this place) and prurient curiosity about how her once-upon-a-time friends had fared in life. The same, presumably, was true for them. Cressida, poor thing, was clearly eager to show off her academic standing and to conceal her disappointment with life. It was a shame, Judith thought, that Cressida was less happy and less likeable than she’d been twenty years ago. Her erudition, which had always been curiously charming, had multiplied into something ungainly.

  Stephen: that was more mysterious. What could possibly be in this for Stephen? It was obvious, for all his lack of ostentation, that he was as rich as Croesus. It wasn’t so much his possessions as his manner, the casual presumption that things were possible. Judith had had enough rich clients over the years to recognise the signs. Could he really be interested in rekindling old acquaintance?

  Then there was Bill.

  Judith had convinced herself, really convinced herself, that there would be no difficulty about Bill. What could be more settled, more boringly steady, than a provincial solicitor? Probate and conveyancing, perhaps a hand in local politics or civic committees. And his bringing his wife meant either that he wanted her here or that she wished it, both of which constituted a solid safeguard. Judith had been sure Bill would be keen to stay at arm’s length, and equally sure that there would be no hint, on her side, of whatever feelings youthful fervour had conjured up two decades ago. She’d found his photograph on his firm’s website: hair more sandy than ginger now, and an expected fullness in the face; a rather foolish half-smile, half hidden by that unflattering beard. Surely not even a desire to prove that she hadn’t lost her touch could tempt her, she’d thought.

  But it had never been easy to account for Bill’s attraction, and he had aged better than his photograph suggested. He was the kind of man in whom at forty you could still clearly see the twenty-year-old, just as at twenty there had been a lingering boyishness about him. He still had that way of smiling that suggested a great fount of exuberance ready to burst forth; that unexpected softness in his eyes.

  Putting Bill’s face deliberately out of her mind, Judith moved over to the window. The night was clear, the fells just discernible in the moonlight. She wasn’t good at stars, but there was the Plough, set out like a diagram in a child’s book, and a sprinkle that might be Cassiopeia. It was odd to think that neither the sky nor the disposition of the landscape had altered since they were last here. Odd, too, that the passing of two decades had made so little impact on the house. Perhaps it simply hadn’t been used that much, Judith thought – but neglect tended to show. Oh yes, neglect took its toll all right.

  With a little snort of self-deprecation, she kicked off her shoes. Her overnight bag sat on a ladder-back chair beneath the window, and she took out her nightdress – a full-length cotton one she hadn’t worn for years – and sponge bag.

  Tucked up at last beneath blankets and counterpane, she felt unexpectedly sleepy, despite the hardness of the mattress and the creaks and whispers of the house. Owls, she remembered. Were there still owls up here?

  She was woken, though, by a different kind of bird call – an abrasive hoot, repeated several times and then falling silent. Judith lay still, waiting to see whether it would begin again. She’d only half heard it, drifting up from sleep: perhaps she’d dreamt it? And then she remembered. The cuckoo clock. Fay’s damned cuckoo clock, its utterances provokingly irregular and piercingly intrusive. Why, sod it, had it chosen to chirrup its greeting to the household now? She reached for her phone and checked the time: 4.02. Damn and blast: she’d never get back to sleep now. These hours of the night were distressingly familiar, with or without cuckoo clocks to rouse her. Insomnia, she’d read, was a growing plague among women in their forties, but it was no consolation to feel herself part of the zeitgeist.

  After a few moments she climbed out of bed. The house was completely dark, but she was sure, as soon as she opened her door, that someone else was up. Any one of the others, woken by the wretched clock. Should she retreat until the coast was clear? No, that was ridiculous.


  She passed the bathroom door and went on towards the kitchen, and just as she reached it someone came out of the sitting room. Bill.

  ‘The cuckoo clock,’ he said. His smile was at once embarrassed and amused, the flick of his eyebrows adding a nuance Judith recognised with a little shock.

  ‘Do you think Fay planned it?’ she asked, half speaking and half mouthing the words.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her.’ He looked at her appraisingly. Judith could almost hear the phrases being shaped and rejected in his head.

  She shivered. ‘Is the fire still going?’

  ‘We could revive it.’

  She gave a little nod, and he turned back into the sitting room. The door was heavy; it swung shut behind them with a gentle clunk. Bill knelt in front of the fireplace, adding kindling and balancing a larger log on top. When he pulled back, there was a leap of flame. Should she turn on a lamp? Judith wondered. If she did, the light filtering out into the garden might be visible from the bedrooms. She hesitated for a moment, then sat down in one of the armchairs that flanked the hearth.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Bill. He kept looking at the fire as he sat down in the other armchair, as though installing himself as guardian of the grate; as though placing himself opposite Judith was the last thing on his mind.

  For a few moments the silence reshaped itself around them, offering both protection and possibility. Judith felt strangely relaxed now. They couldn’t have planned this, and she certainly wouldn’t have willed it, but it felt like a – well, a not unhappy chance. An observance, perhaps, or an acknowledgement, or . . .

  ‘I never stopped loving you, you know,’ Bill said.

  The words seemed to land dead, without reverberation. Had he actually spoken them? Judith kept her eyes on the hearth, watching the flutter of flame about the dark logs, her heart thudding.

  ‘I never stopped loving you,’ Bill said again, as though he wasn’t sure, either, whether he’d spoken aloud.