For the first time, Judith looked directly at him. In the glow from the fire his hair looked redder, his face more sculpted, and his eyes were bright with reflected light.
‘That’s –’ she began.
‘I know you didn’t,’ he said. ‘I mean, you did. Stop. I just wanted you to know. For the record.’
For the record? For the charge list inscribed on her conscience, did he mean? No: something gentler than that; something more devastating.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said – another phrase that could be interpreted dozens of different ways, and none of them accurate. ‘I mean – God, I don’t know. Look at us: we’re forty-one.’
He frowned. His face, his expression, was strange to her, but . . . For goodness’ sake, she mustn’t think like this. Of all the things that should be left to lie, this was surely the most dangerous. Maybe it was a good thing to have raised the ghost, but only to banish it again. Like an immunisation, testing each other with a tiny dose of reminiscence. But still she didn’t move, and nor did he. She could feel the years shimmering between them, the billions of miles starlight had travelled in that time, piercing the sky to reach High Scarp night after night.
‘I feel as though life’s going by and I’m hardly even looking,’ Bill said.
‘Looking for what?’
He shook his head. ‘Not for anything in particular. Just – I feel as though I haven’t dared to look up for twenty years. I had . . . I was ill, a few years ago, and it . . . Maybe it should have changed my perspective more than it did.’
She could see alarm in his face now, as though he was afraid he’d said too much.
‘Bill,’ she said, ‘I know I’m the reckless one, but really, what could we possibly . . .?’
Surely not a clandestine fling, under the nose of his wife. Too ungainly; too tainted with history; too thoroughly pointless. And certainly nothing more. Even if . . . There were too many gaps, Judith thought, in their knowledge of each other. He would never make sense of what she’d become. Imagine her as his second string, he as her third. The thought made her smile, and at the sight of it the cloud cleared from his face.
‘Don’t say anything now,’ he said. ‘Just sit here for a little while. I just want to look at you.’
Oh, bloody hell, Judith thought. The terrible truth was that her blood was stirring too, seductive poison spreading through her limbs, her chest, the pit of her belly. For a moment it almost seemed to her that the world might be simple again; as simple as it had seemed on that night twenty years ago. For a moment her scruples felt inexplicable, anachronistic – and then abruptly clear again.
This was madness: a pathetic yearning for lost youth, for a story that hadn’t been true even then. And even if she could admit that there had been moments of regret, over the years – even if they could possibly have done things differently, back then – they weren’t the same people any more. Everything had changed.
‘Are you married?’ Bill asked. ‘Or . . . spoken for? I should have –’
‘No.’
The inflection of her answer caught his attention: the ironic slant she couldn’t help putting on it. She wasn’t ashamed of the choices she’d made, but she hated the thought of explaining herself to Bill, and she could see him speculating about her reticence now, wondering if and why she was concealing a lover. Would he interpret that in his favour, she wondered, or the opposite? Neither alternative was bearable.
‘I need some more sleep,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Perhaps we could kill that clock, now it’s ours.’
Still she hesitated, though, and he stared at her as she stood irresolute on the hearthrug.
‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘I expect we could.’
The Bill she knew had retreated again, Judith thought. That was for the best, certainly for the best. But even so, she could feel disappointment trailing like a soft veil behind her as she crossed the room and made her way back along the corridor.
September 2015
Bill
The bedroom was very dark when Bill returned. He could just make out Isabel’s head on the pillow, and its stillness and the faint whistle of her breath elicited a dart of relief. He stood for a moment beside the bed, not so much looking down at his wife as looking in on himself. Back across the blurred sweep of the years to another moment – not in this room, thank God, although the congruence was powerful enough without that detail.
Carefully, but not too carefully – it would be worse if Isabel were to wake and detect uncharacteristic stealth – he climbed back under the covers and lay flat, thinking.
Marmion had looked so peaceful that night – that early morning – when he’d come back to bed. The contentment in her sleeping face had raised a kind of futile rage in him, and then a surge of guilt and self-disgust. He had crossed the garden, he remembered, full of exaltation, marvelling at the delicacy of the world as dawn shimmered over the fells and mist melted from the grass, certain that he had found in Judith an answer he hadn’t been seeking, an insight he hadn’t known he lacked. What he’d felt for Marmion had been real enough, but he’d realised that night that it was more like a foreshadowing of love. Like make-believe, almost: a child’s game in which adult emotions were acted out with earnest conviction. He’d felt pity for Marmion, and tenderness, and at that moment a determination that he would deal gently and honestly with her, as she deserved. That was what he was most ashamed of: his failure to live up to that promise. Her heart had been broken not just by his betrayal, but by his dishonesty; his lack of courage.
It was a deep irony, he acknowledged, that it was Marmion, rather than Isabel, to whom his thoughts had turned tonight. Marmion who was beyond any hurt or mitigation, rather than Isabel who was his wife, and who was sleeping beside him now as peacefully as Marmion had been twenty years ago, even if hers was a sleep induced by sedatives rather than blameless happiness. Isabel who still seemed, after all this time, an almost accidental consort.
His marriage was a strange thing. It was, he thought, a cloak of many colours, offering each of them a kind of protection that was expedient rather than embracing. He had never dared analyse it as a whole: it was safer to consider it piecemeal, reserving his gaze to details of fabric or workmanship. There was, for example, that particular combination of vulnerability and self-reliance he’d seen in Isabel’s face when they first met. Marmion’s view of the world had been all of a piece, he thought now, and finding a flaw in one part had undermined her belief and pleasure in the whole. And despite her buoyancy and firm foundations, it had turned out that she needed Bill more, far more, than he’d realised. Isabel, by contrast, wore her neediness on the surface, underpinned by a core of hard realism. Bill had detected that at once, and he had often had cause to be grateful for it. That hard core had been enough for them both, at times. He thought now of their first outing together – you could hardly call it a date, when he’d been stretched tight between grief and guilt and a choking desire for Judith.
‘I could do with a drink,’ Isabel had said, at the end of one of those bewildering days at the Guildhall, before he’d abandoned the singing course and found his way to the College of Law. ‘You look as though you could too.’
That had settled something between them: an alliance built on separate need, jointly solved. Was need something you solved? Bill wondered now. Certainly that had always seemed the right verb for them. For him, anyway, cast violently back on his own resources and the doleful con-solation of his family that autumn. It had been another five years before they’d got married, but although he’d imagined, along the way, that he had a free choice in the matter, when it finally happened he’d seen that it had been inevitable from the start: that he needed Isabel’s grit as much as she needed, wanted, a husband.
Then there was the question of the stitching of this peculiar garment: the question of love, or what stood in for it in their marriage. He’d assumed, hoped, that love would develop over time, but the moment he’d im
agined like a homecoming had never arrived. Other feelings, certainly – gratitude, responsibility, affection, pity – a chan-ging panorama over the years. Enough to weave their lives together, but not to give them the sense of shared purpose he saw in other couples. Always, at the back of his mind, there had been Judith.
Bill was conscious of a growing ache in his shoulder from lying stiffly at the edge of a bed hardly big enough for two people, but he didn’t dare move for fear of waking Isabel. It was a luxury to have this time to think: to savour that encounter by the fire, and to set it in context.
It would have been quite possible, he thought, to find that his feelings for Judith were more myth than reality after all this time. But he’d felt her power over him as soon as she’d arrived this afternoon – and he’d been terrified by it, at first. It wasn’t so much a feeling as a physical reaction, as though every cell in his body was programmed to respond to her. That shining hair; that voice tinged always with some extra colour of amusement or deprecation. And if certain qualities in her had been desiccated by the passage of years – that brash, spiky manner that had lost the bounce and resilience of youth – wasn’t that proof that she needed him: that she needed to be fully loved?
It seemed to him now that he’d been like a man living out a prison sentence these last twenty years. He had accepted that he deserved to suffer, and he’d been grateful for the lenient terms he’d been permitted. But all along there had been the expectation of release, once his dues were paid. And now, surely, was the time. Thank God there were no children to consider. And he’d endured the lymphoma: didn’t that in itself qualify him for parole? Judith’s qualms did her credit, but he’d seen something else in her eyes this evening, something he was sure he hadn’t mistaken. Gazing at her for the first time in two decades, he’d felt a great swelling of anticipatory joy, and with it a sort of wonder that he’d spent so many years only half alive.
But in the wake of this wave of confidence, he felt doubt creeping into his mind now. Had he been too hasty this evening; too naive? Judith had turned him down, turned him away, three times now. Had he misunderstood her motives each time? Was he playing with fire, risking more suffering than he could survive?
Lying in the dark beside his wife, Bill called up with an effort the passion and frustration and heartache of twenty years before. He’d always believed Fate had conspired against the two of them. If he’d blamed Judith at all, it had been for a failure of will, a laudable but excessive susceptibility to guilt. Had he been wrong? Had the circumstances been a convenient cover for her indifference?
No; he wouldn’t believe that. He’d been competent, back then, to judge her feelings. Each of them, he thought now, had faced a battle against predestination: he tainted by the passivity of his family, the timidity and disappointment that had kept them on the back foot all their lives, and she so caught up in the narrative of her own self-determination that she hadn’t been able to carry him, and the burdens of complication and guilt, with her.
Was that right? And if it was, could they overcome all those barriers now?
June 1995
Cressida
Cressida found Marmion outside, wandering among the shrubs and fruit bushes in the lower end of the garden.
‘I haven’t been down here before,’ Marmion said, as she approached. ‘Look at all this fruit. These gooseberries are almost ripe.’
Cressida could see at a glance that the gooseberries were still small and hard, nowhere near ready to pick. ‘So they are,’ she said. ‘Almost. Next week, maybe.’
Marmion cupped a little bunch of gooseberries in her palm, their pale veins tender and vulnerable. She didn’t look at Cressida. ‘I saw Fay down here, a few days ago,’ she said. ‘Maybe she was hoping they were ready.’
‘They might do for jam now,’ Cressida said. ‘I suppose you could try. But . . . I came to tell you Fay’s going to drive us back to Cambridge this afternoon.’ She hesitated. ‘Judith’s parents are taking her home.’
‘I see.’ Marmion plucked a gooseberry off the bush and bit into it, then pulled a face. ‘You’re right. Not ripe yet.’
‘They’re very sour even when they are ripe,’ said Cressida, with an effort at cheerfulness. ‘You have to add masses of sugar. We have a whole thicket of gooseberry bushes at home.’
‘Really?’
‘Maybe . . .’ An idea had occurred to Cressida, and she held it up to the light for a moment, wondering how to broach it. She could tell Marmion wasn’t really interested in the gooseberries, or in her, or in anything very much, just now. But nothing ventured, she told herself. ‘Maybe you could come and stay with me for a while, over the summer?’ she said.
There was a bulge of tears beneath Marmion’s eyes now. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any plans, except for camping in the Isle of Wight. We always go to the same place. I’m rather dreading it this year.’
‘Come and stay with me instead, then. Come to Burcombe.’ Cressida felt a rush of enthusiasm, both for her beneficence and for the prospect of Marmion’s company. She could see them both lying in the garden, going for walks, holing up in the attic. If this was a Jane Austen novel, Marmion’s broken heart would be mended by one of Cressida’s brothers, but she couldn’t quite . . . Tim was all right, though. Marmion would be good for him. ‘Please do,’ she said.
‘Maybe I will.’
But Marmion’s eyes had dropped again, and Cressida felt a flutter of defeat. Marmion had borne her wounds, she thought, without drama, but without false bravery – and Cressida was trying to do the same; to accustom herself to disappointment. She was increasingly sure that her forwardness, her indelicacy, had been too much for Stephen. She’d as good as forced him into having sex, and the pressure of the moment had made him rough and hasty and left him embarrassed. And then she’d grated on his nerves by criticising Judith – making, she thought now, some kind of implicit judgement about their rightness as well as Judith and Bill’s wrongness, as though she felt certain of her position, not just on the moral spectrum but with Stephen. Although the irony was that it was uncertainty that had made her sound so shrill and censorious. Uncertainty and inadequacy and envy – all things to feel ashamed of. In any case, there’d been no more conversations with Stephen, and she was beginning to see that there wouldn’t be, now. What Judith and Bill had done had tarnished all of them, she thought, but she only seemed to have it in her to make things worse.
Marmion plucked another gooseberry and pressed it gently between her finger and thumb.
‘Did I ever tell you that I’d auditioned for the Juilliard?’ she said.
‘No.’ Cressida frowned as the words sank in. Marmion was supposed to be going to the Guildhall, along with Bill. ‘The Juilliard in New York?’
‘They offered me a scholarship. I haven’t given them an answer yet. I never really meant to go, but now I wonder – I can’t think why I auditioned unless I had some idea I might need . . .’
Marmion turned towards another bush, a kind Cressida didn’t recognise, covered with pink powder-puff blossom. Cressida watched her picking the flowers delicately, deliberately, as though she was selecting them for some special purpose. She wondered whether she was supposed to encourage Marmion about the Juilliard, or perhaps discourage her. Could she really want to run as far away as New York? But inviting Marmion to stay had disheartened her. She had no idea what Marmion wanted, she thought, and she had nothing to offer her anyway.
‘Not to rush you,’ she said, ‘but I think Fay would like to get on the road quite soon.’
*
As Cressida walked back up towards the house, she saw Fay standing on the terrace.
‘Have you been inspecting the fruit?’ she asked.
‘Marmion was down there,’ said Cressida. ‘She was hoping the gooseberries were ripe.’
‘They’re like bullets still, I’m afraid,’ Fay said. ‘We could have made a fool, otherwise.’
Cressida climbe
d the last steps and stood next to Fay, looking out at the view. It was very hot today; the swathes of heather and bracken on the fells seemed to blur and shimmer in the glare of the sun. ‘Will you be back up later in the summer?’ she asked. ‘You’ll have quite a harvest in a few weeks.’
But Fay’s smile had vanished: as though she’d remembered something, Cressida thought. Remembered that they’d disappointed her, perhaps. She felt another little plunge of defeat.
In most important respects Fay had been staunch since the accident – rushing down the mountain at high speed, with Cressida stumbling behind, to find a farm cottage with a telephone; driving them all down to Lancaster to visit Judith in hospital; dealing with the doctors and with Judith’s parents. She’d been the capable, responsible adult that the rest of them weren’t, yet. But back at High Scarp she’d spent a lot of time in her room, claiming tiredness or a headache. There had been no more effortlessly produced meals, no more group activities. She must be upset about Judith’s accident, Cressida had thought; she must feel responsible for what had happened. But there’d been no sign of self-reproach in her manner, when they saw her. If anything she seemed to blame them: to blame Judith herself, or Bill, or perhaps all of them. Not that she’d said anything explicit. It was just the way she looked at them, as though she hardly noticed them any more; as though she couldn’t be bothered with them. But then, when Cressida had got used to this new distant mode, the old Fay would suddenly appear again, as she had just now. Just for a few minutes, anyway.
Cressida waited for a moment longer, then she turned towards the house. She could hardly blame Fay if she’d had enough of them all – but it had been her idea, she thought crossly. The whole trip had been Fay’s idea, and climbing Nag’s Pike, too. But shame pressed at her again as that thought took shape in her head. They all needed to get away, that was all. Away from here, and from each other.
‘I’ll go and pack,’ she said. ‘I’ve told Marmion we’re leaving.’
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