Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  It was impossible not to think about it every minute, every hour, but even so the days rolled on, one after another, taking them steadily further away from Marmion. Judith had started at bar school, and the routine of lectures and seminars and reading provided some distraction. She didn’t make contact with any of the others again, and although she wondered how they were and what they were doing, none of them seemed quite real to Judith during those few days. It was as though the realm they had all occupied together no longer existed and they were fading like ghosts, leaving behind the kind of sketchy recollection you might retain after years, rather than days, apart.

  But Marmion remained clear and vivid in her mind’s eye. Not the Marmion who had died so publicly, so dramatically, but the Marmion who had been alive until a few days ago. Little video reels of memory were triggered by the least thing, or by nothing at all: Marmion’s laugh, Marmion’s smile, Marmion’s pronouncements – sometimes over-simple, but often cutting to the heart of the matter. Marmion’s voice; that glorious contralto. How could they possibly have sung at her funeral without her?

  On the bus on Tuesday evening, Judith caught a glimpse of someone who might, just for a second, have been Marmion, and before she understood what was happening she was on her feet, calling out. The woman turned – a woman in her mid-thirties, nothing like Marmion – and Judith was choked with embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

  The woman smiled – she wasn’t English, Judith thought, or at least she didn’t reply to this garbled apology – and Judith sat down again, her heart racing.

  She could hardly bear the elation of that split second when she’d believed that there had been a horrible mistake, and that Marmion wasn’t dead after all. Not just joy that she was alive, but relief that she hadn’t killed her.

  Until that moment, Judith hadn’t allowed herself to articulate that thought. Surprise and wild hope had sprung it from a locked vault somewhere in her mind, but now it was out, there was no escaping it. She sat on the bus, numb with grief and remorse. This was the crux: she hadn’t just betrayed Marmion and made her miserable, she had caused her death. She and Bill. If Marmion hadn’t found out about them – if there had been nothing to find out – she would have gone to the Guildhall with Bill, as she’d planned. She wouldn’t have accepted the offer from the Juilliard, she wouldn’t have been on that aeroplane to New York, and she wouldn’t have died.

  The counterarguments were ready and waiting in Judith’s mind too, as though her subconscious had been wrangling with itself all this time. But they made no difference: Judith knew that as soon as they began to plead their case. No, she couldn’t be blamed for the actions of terrorists; no, she wasn’t unique, at twenty-one, in sleeping with her friend’s boyfriend. But she was still culpable. She was still stifled by a guilt that even she – quick-footed, quick-witted, quick-tongued Judith – could see no prospect of escaping.

  No one else was in when she got back to the flat in Bayswater. Her new flatmates had jobs, and they often went drinking after work. When Judith had told them about Marmion’s death they’d suggested she join them, but she hadn’t. It suited her that their lives barely intersected.

  The phone rang while she was hanging up her coat. Judith picked it up without thinking.

  ‘Is that Judith?’

  Bill’s voice: her heart clanged so loudly she was sure he must be able to hear it, but an invisible hand around her throat made it impossible to speak.

  ‘Judith? Can you hear me? Is Judith there?’

  She put the phone down. It rang again a few seconds later, and she left it for five or six rings, then lifted the receiver and pressed it down again to end the call.

  *

  That afternoon in Bristol seemed aeons ago, but it was only three months. The time they had allotted themselves then was up: it had been up almost exactly the day Marmion died. Judith had no idea whether that . . . adjournment – was that the right word? – made things better or worse. It shouldn’t, surely couldn’t, make any difference now, against such a monstrous backdrop, but it did. Her own actions mattered; her own motivations.

  The compulsive logic that had driven her to reject Bill had fallen away rapidly after graduation day, and since then her feelings had veered between violent extremes. At times her self-denial had seemed almost romantic: she’d imagined herself as Scarlett O’Hara, waiting out the war, hoping she and Bill would be joyfully reunited in the end. But the cool pragmatism of the plan had appealed to her too, and that was more alarming: the thought that she could so calmly submit their desire for each other to some kind of gamble. Rolling the dice again, instead of collecting her winnings. And of course there had been moments, many moments, when she’d longed to turn up on Bill’s doorstep, as he’d turned up on hers that day, and tumble him into bed. She longed for it now, even, when she knew that the bet was over and the dice had fallen against her; when touching Bill would surely call down a lightning bolt of retribution on them both.

  No, there was no way back now; no answering of his calls. All she wished – all there was, hopelessly, to wish for – was that it had made a difference to Marmion. But seeing them hold back from the passion that had ruined her own hopes could only have made things worse for Marmion. If their feelings for each other were so easily contained, how much did that diminish Bill’s for her?

  Judith

  2010

  Midnight. The window is open onto the warm night and city sounds drift up from the street below: the shouting and laughter and honking of horns sound closer than they are, a reassuring backdrop for someone used to urban life. Judith lies very still. The sheets are slightly damp and haphazardly strewn across her. It feels like lying under leaves, pungently evocative of reckless pleasure and its clammy aftermath. Bloody hell, she thinks – but the quiver of disbelief isn’t entirely unpleasant. It shifts, like a colour-change bulb, between dismay and jubilation and hilarity, softened by darkness and wine and by the strangeness of her surroundings.

  One version of the story, she thinks, reads like the opening of a romcom: meet a man you vaguely know on a plane and end up in bed with him in a Paris hotel. It’s the variations on the theme that make or break the plot, though. A man you know because he was once a client. Not so long ago, in fact. A man you defended on a charge of sexual assault, going against your principles because you believed his story, not the intern’s, and because his wife was a feisty, admirable person and she believed him too. A man whose parting shot, after the trial, left you wondering whether you’d both been wrong.

  Thinking about what she has just done with this man, what extraordinary and unexpected things, it’s all Judith can do not to squeeze herself tight around the lingering trace of it, as though to keep hold of it, keep it to herself. Keep it, certainly, from the wife and the intern, and from the judge and jury, although they’re beside the point now. The logic of the world is a peculiar thing, she thinks. The order of things. The shifting of contexts.

  It wouldn’t have happened if she’d had someone with her on this trip – the trip she won in a raffle promoted by the senior clerk in chambers last Christmas. She’d have liked to bring her mother, but she is too poorly at the moment, between cycles of chemo, to manage a city break. Other women, Judith knows, would have a string of friends they could ask, but somehow none of the women she counts as friends quite fitted the bill. Not close enough, not fun enough, not free enough. And it’s out of the question for Arvind, of course. For a risqué arrangement their relationship is remarkably low on risk: Arvind will never be seen with her in the outside world, never anywhere but her flat.

  Over the years Judith has met dozens of men, plenty of them good-looking and interesting and available, and she considers again now, lying awake in a Paris hotel room, the perversity of falling for Arvind, back when he was a pupil and she was a very junior tenant, and then sticking with the limited, limiting pleasures he has brought her. He was already married then, to
a pretty girl who is happy, despite her English upbringing, to play the good Indian wife to her barrister husband, and who has produced two little girls whose photographs Arvind keeps in his wallet. No: there will never be a weekend in Paris with Arvind, and she knows, in some corner of her mind, that it was that knowledge which drove her into the liaison; which has kept it alive.

  Should she be grateful that the way was open, is always open, for encounters like this one with Jonty Scott? She hardly knows. The Judith who asks questions like that is a different Judith to the one who answers them.

  Down below she hears voices raised: a Saturday-night rabble on their way home from a bar, or perhaps on their way to another. Judith listens idly, trying to fit a storyline to the soundtrack. How many people? Arguing or just teasing? Who has a beef with whom? She can’t make out the words being hurled about, but she can imagine some of them: perhaps the phrase she heard on the Métro earlier, delivered with fine invective by a young Parisienne into her mobile phone. Putain de merde, mais qu’est-ce que t’as foutu? Judith’s French is rusty, but it used to be good enough to swear with gusto. Rolling the phrase around in her head, enjoying the feel of it, it occurs to her that she has no call to swear like that in any language these days. Her life, for all its unconventionality, has become sedate. For a moment self-pity flushes through her, but then there’s a scream down below, cutting across the rest of the noise: an ululating scream that starts at full volume and doesn’t let up.

  Judith freezes, listening intently now. Sooner than she would have thought possible a siren accelerates up the narrow street and comes to a halt just outside the hotel, and then there are more voices, raised and urgent, before the siren resumes, tearing away again. After that there’s a quiet that feels more unnatural, more alarming than the noise that still echoes in her ears.

  My God, Judith thinks, is someone dead? Was it a dereliction of responsibility to lie motionless while someone was killed twenty metres below – to lie here and have no certain idea what was happening? There would have been nothing she could do, she tells herself; there are plenty of other windows to provide witnesses. But even so she feels a waft of guilt, and doubt catches at the tangle of feelings about her own little adventure – which suddenly seems both more serious and less; something happening at one remove, like the incident in the street, or an anecdote being told years later. And where does it end, the anecdote, she wonders? What’s the punchline?

  Nothing breaks the silence now, and Judith can feel her grasp on the night start to loosen, and a gust of wind lifting her out of herself, filling the space where she’s been with white noise. Not yet, she thinks, as the world throbs and blurs and fades. I can’t go to sleep when someone has just died: or did I dream that? She scrabbles for a handhold, something to help her cling on to consciousness. Not yet: I need to know how it ends first.

  *

  Since her mother fell ill, Judith has found herself looking at things differently. Not just the things you might expect – mortality, loyalty, suffering – but other things too. In fact, principally herself: in the last few months she has often come face to face with the present-day Judith with a jolt of surprise, as though she has aged ten or twenty years in a flash, instead of inching forward year by year. This isn’t what’s supposed to happen when one of the people you love most in the world is critically ill, but it has hit Judith with slam-dunk inevitability: a sudden clarity of self-awareness.

  She isn’t middle-aged yet – thirty-seven is surely not middle-aged, in this century – but she’s not young any more, and the feisty, clever, confident Judith who set out into the world at eighteen hasn’t yet solidified into any of the final adult forms she might have taken. She hasn’t made the transition from promise to proof – and the more she thinks about it, the less sure she is about how far she’s travelled along that road. Of course it’s hard, as a barrister, to know whether she’s on the right track, edging gradually towards silk, but it’s not just her career that suffers this sudden lurch of perspective. She’s always known she won’t have children with Arvind, but she finds now that she’s been assuming she still has a free choice about motherhood, and when she faces that assumption squarely she can see that it’s flawed. Nothing’s certain. Nothing’s certain at all. Standing beside her mother’s bed as she drifted in and out of consciousness after her first operation, it occurred to her that life might consist of the steady erosion of certainties, rather than the cementing of them.

  She and her mother have always been close. Perhaps it’s no surprise that she should falter too, when her mother does. There are phrases for this, clichés: the foundations of her life are being rocked. Judith imagines, though, a kaleidoscope being shaken, the recognisable pattern of the world metamorphosing before her eyes as it did once before. She can see all at once how fast the decades pass, the acceleration towards forty and fifty and sixty, her life a whirligig spinning out of control.

  And it’s not just the passage of time that troubles her, the slip and slide of possibility. She’s always imagined that her exotic ancestry distinguished her from the general run of people, setting her on a particular, privileged trajectory through life. She must, surely, have a more complex, more nuanced perspective than her peers, her insights infused with that rich brew of genes and her judgements shaped by the heady atmosphere of enquiry and tolerance in which she grew up. But in those long nights of introspection, while her mother underwent tests and more tests and started on treatments that frightened even her, Judith began to suspect that she should have taken less for granted than other people, not more: that navigating a life without the conventional struts of culture and religion, the reassurance of tradition and convention, requires greater clarity of purpose than she has brought to bear on hers. It occurred to her that the most distinctive thing about her is that she’s an only child, clever but spoilt, with an only child’s belief that she’ll get what she wants from life – but she hardly knows, still, what it is she wants. And meanwhile she’s getting too old to be spoilt, and her body has more than a trace of the soft doughnut flesh of her Pakistani grandmother these days, a little less of the sharp, calligraphic angles of her elegant Jewish mother.

  You look tired, her mother said, next time she visited. You look worse than me, Judith: you should have a holiday. Judith smiled and shook her head – but when the raffle prize fell into her lap, she booked the flights before she could change her mind.

  *

  The hotel curtains are thin, and the coffee-coloured fabric does no more than add an earthy tone to the early-morning light. For a second – not even a second – Judith thinks the man beside her might be someone else, but he’s not.

  This is the wrong light to see Jonty Scott in, she thinks. Although it’s difficult to know what the right light would be; whether any light could make him look less like a thug. A hard bastard, he called himself at some point last night, although that was meant to be ironic, self-deprecatory. Or so Judith thought at the time: it’s not easy to imagine irony or self-deprecation playing any part in Jonty when you see him asleep. If there’s any gentleness in the man, it’s not in his body, the heavy torso filling three quarters of the bed and the ugly face that looks pugnacious even in repose. It’s the kind of face some women swoon over, but not Judith, until now. Judith has always preferred her men smooth-skinned and boyish.

  As she looks at Jonty he stirs, cocks open an eye. She doesn’t move, doesn’t smile; waits to see what he makes of his situation.

  ‘Morning, gorgeous,’ he says. The estuary colour comes and goes, she’s noticed. Not much of him is susceptible to disguises, but in that respect at least he’s a chameleon. ‘Been awake long?’

  ‘No.’ She yawns – not deliberately, but she realises too late that it looks like an attempt at verisimilitude.

  ‘Sleep OK?’

  ‘Apart from the murder below the window in the small hours.’

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

  ‘That’s what it sounded like. Police sirens
and lots of screaming.’

  He grins. ‘Sleep of the just, for me,’ he says. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Ten thirty.’ He must be in Paris on business: has he got meetings this morning? she wonders. But his face doesn’t change.

  ‘Don’t suppose they run to room service here. Shall we go out for breakfast?’

  Despite herself, Judith feels a frisson of pleasure. Even if it’s just breakfast, that’s more dignified than parting at her bedroom door. On impulse, she leans forward and kisses him quickly on the lips before she slides out of bed and into the bathroom.

  One thing in Jonty’s favour: he has plenty of money. Two things, in fact: he has plenty of money and he knows how to spend it. The place he takes Judith to for breakfast is sumptuous, with Moorish tiles and plants everywhere, orchids and aspidistras and cacti studded with jewel-like flowers. The food looks sensational too. Scrutinising the menu, Judith feels suddenly ravenous.

  ‘Anything catch your eye?’ Jonty asks.

  ‘Everything,’ says Judith.

  He lifts an eyebrow as the waiter approaches, and orders, in heavily accented but confident French, two petits déjeuners gastronomiques – enough food for a day or two, Judith thinks. Perhaps they can sit here all day and eat it. The thought makes her smile, and Jonty smiles too.

  The cold light of morning, Judith thinks, ought to make her consider his wife, but she suspects Jonty’s wife would be unsurprised to see him here with her. She might even be seen in a place like this herself, with a man who isn’t her husband. This is the way they do things, Judith thinks: she won’t be the first or the last. That thought is reassuring, but it also needles her into exerting herself. She’s noticed other women clocking Jonty, and she likes the thought that he’s a prize, even if he’s not her kind of prize. She wants to be sure she can keep his attention as long as she wants it: that when there’s dismissing to be done, she’s the one doing it.