‘I graduated four years ago,’ says Stephen.
‘Ha. Sing there?’
‘In the chapel choir? Yes.’ Stephen smiles, marvelling at the ease of it. Like turning a key in a well-oiled lock, he thinks.
‘See, Lucy?’ Lucy hasn’t been listening: her eagle eye has been caught, perhaps, by another infraction. ‘St Anne’s choral scholar.’
‘Really?’
She is in grey satin this evening, pinched in at the waist. Suky is wearing a black dress with lace at the front, more risqué than last time. Stephen wonders if it’s for his benefit, then catches her eye and decides it is. He’s flattered: she’s one of those English roses who has a little too much of the golden retriever about her, but she’s unquestionably pretty.
There are two intervals this evening: the first is for tea, a fifteen-minute break after Act One, with the long picnic interval following an hour later. Stephen’s hungry by then, having resisted the cake on offer earlier. He’s on his feet before the Atkins clan, and he’s taken aback when Lucy turns to him.
‘Would you care to bring your picnic to join us, Mr Evans?’ she says. ‘We have a table in the patrons’ tent.’
*
The Atkinses’ picnic is not as elaborate as some Stephen has seen, but it certainly represents due diligence. What Lucy Atkins evidently considers the minimum number of elements necessary to a proper Micklethorpe picnic have been packed in Tupperware containers of various sizes and then fitted inside a wicker hamper with the precision of a mathematical puzzle. A great deal of time is spent locating the requisite boxes, decanting their contents into dishes, serving them up, and then repacking the remains into the boxes and the dirty plates and cutlery into a plastic bag that has been brought for the purpose. Less time is spent on eating the food. By the time this rigmarole has been completed three or four times (smoked salmon on crustless brown bread; a pale-looking quiche and several salads; strawberries and cream; cheese and crackers), Stephen has long since finished his egg sandwiches and slice of fruit cake.
The advantage of all this, however, is that he has plenty of time to observe the Atkinses, while they are unable to devote much energy to interrogating him. Sir Peter (Stephen has done his research: he doesn’t intend to be caught out on a point of etiquette) limits his conversation to well-chosen compliments on each course and observations about the orchestral playing and the clemency of the weather. Lady Atkins dispenses food with determined efficiency, clucking from time to time as though an anonymous minion has interfered in some way with her arrangements. Suky has evidently learned strategy at her father’s knee and she too says little, but she offers Stephen a smile from time to time.
‘Coffee?’ says Lucy, at last. The question includes Stephen. Glory be, he thinks. Nary a strawberry, but perhaps an After Eight, if he’s lucky.
‘So you were at Cambridge,’ Suky says, as though an unseen signal has indicated that more general conversation may begin. ‘Did you love it? I applied, but I didn’t really have a hope.’
Stephen considers this. Did he love it?
‘It feels rather a long time ago already,’ he says. ‘A different life.’
‘What do you do now?’ Suky asks.
‘Just at the moment I’m based in Riyadh,’ he says. ‘I’m home on leave for a couple of weeks.’
‘Oil?’ asks Sir Peter.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Stephen smiles. ‘Not much happens in Riyadh that isn’t connected with oil, although that’s starting to change.’
There’s a small silence after this statement, but then Suky smiles at him.
‘I’d love to go to the Middle East,’ she says.
‘Whatever for?’ asks her mother. ‘No place for a young woman.’
Stephen sees a retort on Suky’s lips, a how would you know, and he feels a dart of admiration. He’s torn between waiting to see if it emerges and offering a comment of his own, and meanwhile the moment passes and Lady Atkins’s remark is allowed to stand. Prudence, he thinks, wins the day.
‘What do you do?’ he asks Suky instead, and she blushes a little, as though she’s not used to being regarded as an adult.
‘Oh, I’ve only just finished university,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure what you do with a maths degree. Teach, maybe.’
‘Corporate finance,’ says Stephen. ‘The banks need good people, and a maths degree is the right entrée. I could give you a few names.’
Another silence: he’s gone too far, Stephen thinks. It’s not for him to offer connections. But Sir Peter nods.
‘That’s a good thought,’ he says. ‘Worth looking into.’
They are spared further conversation by the boy with the handbell, coming into the marquee to signal the end of the interval. The same boy as the other night, in the too-large dinner jacket. Stephen watches him for a moment, then turns his eyes away, back to Suky.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’ He glances round, wondering if he should offer to help, but the Atkinses’ picnic has vanished without trace into the wicker basket.
*
Driving down to Micklethorpe again on Tuesday night, Stephen examines his heart with unaccustomed candour. He has fallen in love with Wagner, he acknowledges, but as the Gloucestershire countryside unfolds, he admits that part of the glow of anticipation he feels is for Suky rather than Götterdämmerung.
His mother’s words about marriage have kept coming back to him these last few days. Is it for that reason that he feels a glimmer of interest in Suky? No: there’s something about her – several things, in fact – that intrigue him. Attract him, even. On the face of it, she’s the last kind of woman he’d expect to have anything in common with – a scion of the upper middle classes, brought up in a large house in Hampstead, conventionally beautiful in a way that will set and harden into a version of her mother. But then there’s that gentle voice with its infusion of irony; the fact that she studied maths rather than art history, and that she is neither cowed by her mother nor obdurately rebellious. She strikes him as a misfit, someone who has her eye on a different kind of life from the one mapped out for her. No one has mapped out Stephen’s life, and she might enjoy the freedom that brings.
And Suky has skills he doesn’t have: she’s good at people, he thinks. She would open doors, smooth paths, fill evenings. And she seems to find him worth bothering with. If he’s learned one thing over the last few years, it’s never to let an opportunity pass without proper consideration.
He is aware, though, that other factors are at play, and as the car winds once more through the country lanes, he reviews them dispassionately. As dispassionately as he can, anyway. There’s his mother’s desperate hope of grandchildren. There’s a desire – not to join Suky’s family, not that at all, but to find out what might by created by combining her genes, her upbringing, with his. This is tricky ground – on several counts it’s tricky ground – but for Stephen, who has never dwelt among his kith and kin, the idea of establishing himself as a patriarch, of founding his own family, is powerful.
And then, of course, there’s the tempting prospect of rising to the challenge of Lucy Atkins’s opposition – because Stephen is under no illusion that her invitation on Sunday evening was prompted by anything other than a good general’s instinct to keep the enemy under surveillance. He may have made her smile, even nod in agreement once or twice, but she has found out quite enough about him to decide that he can never be more than a curiosity to the Atkins family. Her husband is an affable chap – it’s Lucy rather than him who would be a real terror on the Queen’s Bench, Stephen thinks – but his views on the matter are unlikely to make any impression. His views on any matter, in fact, are rapidly corrected by his wife.
‘Which recording of The Ring do you prefer?’ Stephen asks, as they take their seats for Act One that evening. It’s a mischievous ploy: he knows they won’t be able to resist the question, but can’t possibly answer it satisfactorily in the few minutes before the curtain goes up.
‘It’s hard to beat Karl Böhm’s Bayreuth recording from the late sixties,’ begins Sir Peter.
‘Nonsense.’ His wife smiles crisply as she cuts across him. ‘You simply have a weakness for Birgit Nilsson. Fürtwangler’s RAI recording is a much better option. And the Goodall recording in English is excellent too, for a newcomer. Rita Hunter at the peak of her powers.’
‘Stephen speaks fluent German, Mummy,’ says Suky.
‘Flagstad, actually, is my favourite Brünnhilde,’ says Sir Peter. Stephen catches a smile that has a hint of the conspiratorial about it. Perhaps this is one advantage of Wagner: a licence to nurture passion for women other than your wife. Stephen can’t see anyone burning with ardour for the Finnish soprano singing Brünnhilde this week, who is constructed on an uncompromisingly Wagnerian scale, but he can imagine soothing his soul with her recordings on the many nights he spends in hotel rooms around the globe. He’s glad to have established that she has plenty to sing tonight, and he settles back in his seat to enjoy it.
*
‘Joining us again?’ Sir Peter leans past his wife to catch Stephen’s attention as the curtain comes down for the long interval.
Ah, he’s cannier than he looks, Stephen thinks. Years of practice, no doubt, in managing his way silkily around Lucy’s authority. She can hardly countermand a public invitation.
‘I’d be delighted,’ he says.
Suky’s smile, behind her mother’s head, is radiant. Stephen feels his heart falter in a way that he tells himself represents the awakening of love.
*
Later – much later – Stephen looks back on that evening without regret. On its sequelae, too. He succeeded in freeing Suky from her mother, for one thing. He gave his own mother, who was diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks before the wedding, a daughter-in-law. In the game of Twister that his life has come to resemble, placing his right hand in the circle labelled ‘marriage’ for a few rounds has done him no harm. And he understood afterwards, if he didn’t before, that he will never dwell among his kith and kin.
Part IV
September 2015
Stephen
Stephen was awake early. He’d long since given up wondering which time zone his body thought it was in, or contemplating remedies for its confusion. He’d never needed much sleep, and he needed less and less as the years passed. And there was still something exciting to him about waking before it was light: it reminded him of childhood Christmases, of the pleasure of a day not yet begun.
Pulling on a T-shirt and jogging pants, he padded up the corridor past the bedrooms in which the others still slept. In the sitting room he was surprised to find the fire burning vigorously, a large log barely half-consumed. Someone else was up then, or had been not long ago. An insomniac rather than an early riser, perhaps. He imagined each of them claiming their quarter of the night, their stake in the house. For a moment he considered settling by the fire with a book, but the thought of tasting the fells before sunrise was too tempting. He’d come close to trouble sometimes, slipping out of hotels in unfamiliar cities to roam the streets in the small hours, but he wasn’t likely to encounter anything more dangerous than sheep here. The thought filled him with a strange elation: he was so rarely away from civilisation.
He remembered the path that started just below the house, one fork leading round to the waterfall cave and the other tracking up the side of the fell towards a small tarn. He’d go that way, he thought. He remembered looking down on High Scarp from above, a little way along: a useful view of a property you were about to inherit.
The moon had been bright at midnight, but it wasn’t visible now, and the dawn was only a water stain in the cleft of the valley. But the ground seemed to give off its own faint light, just enough to follow your footsteps, and Stephen barely stumbled as he climbed the stony track.
The unease he’d felt the previous evening was ebbing away now. He thought back to the conversation over dinner, the disquieting alternation of assertiveness and self-deprecation, formality and familiarity. ‘Cambridge has changed beyond all recognition,’ Cressida had said at one point, claiming a particular position as gatekeeper, and Judith had laughed a little unkindly and said, ‘I expect there’s a Costa in King’s Chapel now, eh?’ And then Bill’s exaggerated bonhomie as he said, ‘It’s a toss-up some days whether I feel sorrier for my clients or myself.’ His wife sitting silently, her eyes moving from one face to another, and finally asking, in the middle of a hiatus, ‘What exactly is it you do, Stephen?’ ‘Oh, this and that,’ he’d said; ‘most of it very dull.’ They would think he was a spy, he thought now, with a glimmer of amusement. Although they’d all been inclined to reticence, or at least been selective about what they revealed. And they had connived, between them, to keep the conversation away from Marmion. Or so it had seemed to him: each of them aware of her name hovering in the air, and willing someone else to speak it first.
Two hours was all they had managed, anyway, before they’d agreed to call it a night. It had been almost eleven by then, and they’d all had a long day, a long journey, but even so Stephen had felt a pinch of disappointment that they weren’t sitting up late over whisky and firelight. A pinch of disappointment that emanated, perhaps, from some shared sensibility which they hadn’t quite managed to reinhabit.
If Fay had hoped to reunite them in spirit as well as body then she might be disappointed, he thought now, scrambling over a steeper, rougher part of the track, as a sheep shambled hastily away. He’d cavilled at Judith’s tone last night, but she was right that Fay had liked to be in charge. Mostly – perhaps entirely – in a benevolent way. She’d been a kind of fairy godmother, and fair enough if it had been on her terms. He realised now that they’d taken her patronage very much for granted. They’d shared a youthful arrogance, an assumption that it was perfectly natural for an older woman to take such an interest in them. Towards the end he’d had his own theory, of course, about her motives – a theory that had thrust itself back into his mind when the solicitor’s letter had arrived a few weeks ago. There must be some explanation, after all, both for Fay’s kindness to them twenty years ago and for her bequest. Presumably the lawyer would bring answers, later today – not just to that question, but perhaps to others too.
Stephen halted for a moment at a fork in the path and looked up: the sky was perceptibly lighter already. The day would come quickly now. Below him, the landscape was taking shape, the curve of river and road in the valley bottom overlaid still with the sepia tint of night, but no longer lost in shadow. The tarn must be further than he remembered. Perhaps it was time to turn back, so that he’d be there when the day began at High Scarp. They may not owe each other anything, but it might be as well for them all to stick together, this weekend.
As he made his way back down the hill, Stephen pondered this thought. It was almost as though he kept catching himself in double-think; in recovering hopes he hardly knew he had. Part of him could see quite clearly that the five of them had been united, twenty years ago, by a general compatibility which had been fostered and cemented by circumstances. By Cambridge and music, and by Fay. And it was only because of Fay, of course, that they were together again. But now he felt a prick of shame at the cool rationality of this analysis. He was wary, still, of his motives, and of the risk of self-deception – but however complicated things had become, it was certainly true that they had owed each other something once, and that wasn’t something you could ignore.
Reaching the gate at the bottom of the hill, he ran his hand along the smooth surface of the wood – the very same wood, no doubt, that he had touched, that they had all touched, twenty years before. Beside the fence, heard rather than seen, ran the narrow ghyll that dipped underground a few yards on, and overhead the branches of a sycamore sighed and whispered. It wasn’t true that he cared nothing for the others, Stephen admitted. He’d used that defence twenty years ago, flying away to his new life across the globe, and it hadn’t been true then either. He wasn’t used t
o thinking about other people in this way, but the feeling, though uncomfortable, wasn’t entirely unwelcome.
*
There was still no sign of life when he re-entered the kitchen, but the clock above the door stood at ten past seven. He’d been out for longer than he’d realised. He made a cup of tea and took it through to the sitting room, where the fire was in need of reviving now. He raked the embers and added another log, then sank down in one of the sagging armchairs. Most of the furniture needed to be thrown out, he thought. The beds were execrable. The dining chairs could be reupholstered, but most of the rest was well past its sell-by date. An expression of his mother’s – not that she had thrown out a piece of furniture in her life, not even when he’d urged her to let him provide more comfortable sofas, or a new kitchen. Stephen felt a perverse pride in such thrift, but even so he would do his best, he thought, to persuade the others to dispose of the contents of High Scarp.
He heard a noise in the kitchen then, and a moment later the door opened.
‘Hello,’ said Judith. ‘How long have you been up?’
‘I’m an early bird,’ Stephen said. His mother again, ever eager to approve of his habits. ‘I’ve been for a walk. Up the fell.’
‘Earned your breakfast, then.’
Judith glanced towards the window: Stephen had the impression she was weighing up something she might say to him.
‘Even if it’s not your speciality, you must know a bit about the legal side of this,’ he ventured.
‘A bit,’ said Judith. She didn’t turn round at once: she made a show of flicking through a book she’d picked up, before shutting it and sliding it back into the shelf. ‘Not the detail, of course, but the general set-up. It’s called a condition precedent.’
‘Requiring us all to come up here this weekend to meet the lawyer?’
‘And whatever else is specified.’
Every Secret Thing Page 16