‘I know that you quarrelled, you and Marmion,’ said her mother, without further preamble.
Bill looked up sharply. He hadn’t expected this: hadn’t prepared himself, he realised, for any specific conversation at all. He’d imagined an evening of platitudes and painful companionability.
‘I know that’s why she decided to go to New York,’ Mrs Hayter went on. ‘I’m sure you blame yourself, Bill. I wanted to tell you that you mustn’t.’
Bill said nothing. He tried to keep his eyes on Mrs Hayter’s face, its expression as calm now as if she were explaining that he wasn’t responsible for the falling of rain or the coming of night, but his gaze slipped ineluctably, shamingly, down to the floor.
‘Young people do quarrel, Bill,’ Mrs Hayter said. ‘You made her very happy; remember that. It isn’t right to lie about our feelings. Nor is it right to assume responsibility for events beyond our control.’
Bill looked up at her again. He’d assumed that she had only a partial understanding of the situation, which would have made her forgiveness excruciating. But he wondered now whether she knew more about what had happened this summer than he’d imagined. For a moment he wanted desperately to ask, to explain, to beg for full and proper absolution, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t because despite his affection and pity for this woman – despite his affection and pity for her dead daughter – what possessed him, filling his mind with a throb and beat beside which everything else was reduced to a whisper, was Judith. Even here among all the photographs of Marmion, in the house where she had grown up, he couldn’t stop thinking about how badly he wanted to see Judith. He wanted to throw himself on her mercy, to lose himself in her and obliterate his shame.
Flushing deeply, he stood up.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said, hating the unsteadiness of his voice, and the way it would sound to Marmion’s mother. ‘More than kind. When you have so much to . . .’
‘Come and eat now,’ she said. She didn’t look at him again. Perhaps she had exhausted her self-control, he thought, or perhaps at last she had detected his perfidy.
*
By the time he left, Bill felt ragged with exhaustion and self-hatred. The Hayters had eaten, as they usually did, in silence, but this evening the silence had been punctuated with remembrances of Marmion, each of them offered as a gift to the others around the table but reaching Bill as a reproach. With a false show of reticence and of deferral to family custom, he had avoided the shy glances of the younger Hayters and the more candid gaze of Pip, the eldest. He felt like a stain on this blameless family; the ruin of them all. As soon as he decently could he escaped, promising to see them at the meeting house tomorrow, promising to keep in touch. It seemed impossible now that he had ever, as her mother claimed, made Marmion happy. He was a villain from a morality tale; an evil wizard dressed up as a handsome prince.
October 1995
Cressida
The Friends Meeting House in Regent’s Park Road was among the oldest in London, Cressida had discovered, a demure but distinguished neighbour to the Nash terraces that flanked the park. Inside it was plain, light-filled, high-ceilinged, with unostentatious white panelling and long windows set high in the walls. The doors to the main meeting room were open, but a lot of people were milling about in the outer room, where a large book lay open on a table.
The murmur of voices was subdued, but even so the atmosphere wasn’t what she’d expected. The marking of death in silence had conjured something brutally austere in her mind, but it was clear as soon as she walked in that this would not be an occasion without comfort – and paradoxically that realisation, the recognition of the warmth that could both temper and intensify grief, undid the control she’d managed to sustain all the way here on the Tube. Standing just inside the door, she felt tears sliding down her cheeks.
‘Cressida?’ said a voice, half familiar. ‘It is Cressida, isn’t it?’
She turned to see Marmion’s mother, tall, staunch, providential – and so like Marmion that Cressida was shocked out of her tears.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Hayter. We’re all completely devastated.’
Mrs Hayter put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s very good to see you, Cressida,’ she said. ‘We shall need Marmion’s friends. There’s a book – we’d like a record of who was here. Do sign it, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Cressida. Across the room she could see Marmion’s little sisters, Becky and Maggie, and her brother Pip, smiling and shaking hands. The wrench of loss tore at her chest again; the multiplicity of grief. How much they must feel it, she thought, this close-knit family. Mrs Hayter pulled her suddenly into an embrace, then released her with a tiny collecting sigh.
‘Do go in, when you’re ready,’ she said. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’
Ready, Cressida thought. What an extraordinary thought: that she might be ready to say goodbye to Marmion; that her family might. That they should all congregate here so calmly, spend an hour together and go away having passed some kind of watershed. It struck her then that among the layers of sorrow was one that arose from her certainty that she could never feel as much for the death of one of her brothers as the Hayters, for all their Quakerly restraint, could feel for Marmion.
She had imagined the St Anne’s quartet gathering beforehand, sitting together, but none of them had been in touch since that meeting in the pub, so things had been left to chance, and it seemed that chance had no desire to throw them together. It was ten to three, and Cressida couldn’t see any of them. People were moving through to the meeting room now, leaving space for latecomers in the outer room, and Cressida followed the tide. Never mind the group, she thought. The group was no more, anyway: if Nag’s Pike hadn’t undone it, Marmion’s death certainly had. And perhaps their grief for Marmion was nobler for not being pooled.
She stopped briefly on the threshold. Sunlight fell across the wide room, glancing off a large framed picture of Marmion propped on an easel at the front. Cressida felt her pulse throb: it was a recent photograph, so lifelike that the shock of recognition crowded out, for a moment, the realisation that it stood in the place where the coffin might have been. Of course there couldn’t be a coffin, she told herself, but its absence was somehow more appalling than its presence would have been. Her mind skittered over news reports and police procedurals, wondering whether Marmion had been found, whatever was left of her – but no, she wouldn’t think about that, about any of that. It was too much to cope with. She took a deep breath, steadying herself, and looked about her for a place to sit. Her eye fell on a man in a suit sitting alone near the end of a row, with a spare seat beside him. As she made her way towards him, he turned slightly, and with a start she realised who it was.
‘Stephen!’ Her voice was louder than she intended; she blushed, even though there seemed to be no rule of silence in place yet. Oh, she was pleased to see him. Stephen, of all of them.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘You look . . . The suit, Stephen! And you’ve had your hair cut.’
‘I’m flying to Dubai in three days.’
‘Oh . . .’ Cressida was embarrassed by the anguish in her voice. Of course he was going; of course there was no reason for him to change his plans. ‘I can’t bear the thought of you flying,’ she said, scrambling to recover herself. ‘I mean, after . . .’
He smiled, and tilted his head to one side in the way he did that meant oh well or so be it.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘What about you? How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ Cressida said – although at that moment she felt utterly bereft. She knew Stephen had always planned to go abroad; she knew none of this was her fault. But she couldn’t help feeling that what she’d done and said had made it impossible for those who were left to recover any part of what they’d lost. She couldn’t help feeling that if Stephen thought better of her . . .
‘I’ve got a tiny flat in the graduate block on Madin
gley Road,’ she said, collecting herself as best she could. ‘It’s very quiet. There’s a garden at the back.’
‘Good,’ said Stephen. ‘I can picture you there, cooking up soup when you get back from the library.’
Cressida’s mouth trembled. ‘I can’t,’ she said. And it was true: the prospect of it all, the excitement of settling into her new life, had evaporated in the last week.
Just then they were aware of quiet falling over the room. Marmion’s family were moving up the aisle, making their way to the front. Marmion’s father, tall and spare, stood facing them all. For a few moments he said nothing, and then, in a voice that betrayed no sense of hurry, no sense of heaviness, he welcomed everyone, thanked them for coming and invited them to join in remembering and giving thanks for their wonderful daughter Marmion, taken from them so suddenly and loved by so many.
He was about to sit down when he stopped, smiled almost to himself, then went on in a slightly different tone of voice.
‘Those of you with a literary bent will be aware that Marmion is an odd name for a Quaker child – that it’s the title of an epic poem about the Battle of Flodden, and that its eponymous hero was a famous reprobate. I should perhaps explain that Marmion was named after her great-grandmother, whose parents had certainly never read Walter Scott.’ A faint ripple of amusement went round the room.
‘However,’ Mr Hayter continued, ‘however. Scott has provided us, in Marmion’s name, with some lines that seem too apt to pass over as we consider how to comfort each other.’ He unfolded a piece of paper, glanced at it, then hesitated again before he went on.
‘O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant; And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that’s broken.’
There was silence now; a listening, thinking silence Cressida had rarely encountered before.
‘And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but death who comes at last,’ Mr Hayter read. ‘But search the land of living men, Where wilt thou find their like again?’
He cleared his throat. ‘There are no words I can speak that will honour Marmion fittingly, but I hope you will find the words – the thoughts – to do so, and will feel free to share them with us.’
As Mr Hayter took his seat, tears brimmed again in Cressida’s eyes. With a quick sidewards glance, Stephen passed her a handkerchief – a proper cotton handkerchief, properly ironed. Pressing it to her face, she breathed in the smell of starch and soap powder, a smell she had never associated with Stephen but which seemed suddenly absolutely his, redolent of the broad tracts of his life she knew nothing about. What on earth did his parents think – his mother who ironed his handkerchiefs – about him moving from Surbiton to Dubai?
*
After a while the tiny shifts of breath and cloth that filled the room and the distant accidents of sound from outside fell away, leaving only the white space and the silent hum of thought almost palpable around them, gathering like cloud or candyfloss or the invisible spinning of hundreds of silkworms. What Cressida could hear in the centre of it was music: Marmion’s voice joining with theirs to sing Bruckner’s Locus iste. In the silence she followed the motet quite clearly: the soprano line soaring to its climax for the second time, floating through the pianissimo echo, then dropping towards the delicious hanging discords where the two top lines leant on each other, drawing apart step by chromatic step before the final, gentle resolution. She heard Marmion’s wonderfully resonant low Bs, dipping down towards the tenor part before rising towards the soprano line again; saw the radiant intensity on her face as they heard the final chord echo above them.
It was almost inconceivable that it was only a matter of weeks since they had sung that piece together in the little church in Griseley. Locus iste a Deo facto est: this place was made by God. That place had felt as though it was made by God, that stone church in its idyllic valley, but the snake, Cressida thought, had been among them all the time.
She heard a rustle of movement then and she realised that someone was sitting down, having stood up to speak. Had she been so lost in recollection, in Bruckner, that she hadn’t heard what was said? Bewildered, she glanced at Stephen, wondering what she’d missed, but his face betrayed nothing. Cressida’s heart thumped a little, but in a moment the silence had settled around them again and her agitation was stilled. Other people spoke after that: sometimes beginning timidly, they each said poignant, graceful things about Marmion, and Cressida wished she had the courage and the eloquence to add her contribution – but what she most wanted to say didn’t bear public examination. It seemed to Cressida that the purpose of this occasion for her – perhaps for all of them – was to recover, as best they could, the joyful Marmion, the serene Marmion, the person she would surely, eventually, have been again.
And then, before she would have thought it possible, the hour was over. Everyone was shifting and coughing and whispering, and the silk net was lifting, melting back into the air. Stephen stood up, and Cressida followed suit. Across the room she spotted Judith, incongruous in severe black, and at the same time Stephen said, ‘There’s Bill.’
So they were all here, after all. And there were others from the choir too, from the years above and below: there was Deep Patel and Lawrence Watts and a couple of other dons Cressida recognised. Within the crush of people drinking tea and eating cake in the adjacent hall afterwards, the St Anne’s cohort clustered together, those who’d known Marmion less well diluting the fraught intensity of the inner circle. No sign of Fay, though. It wasn’t usually hard to pick her out in a crowd. She must still be ill, Cressida thought – and then, with a jolt of guilt, it occurred to her that perhaps no one had told Fay that Marmion was dead.
‘What a turnout!’ said Lawrence, catching Cressida’s eye. ‘Terrible shame, though. Terrible waste.’
Cressida managed a thin smile. She would have liked to punch him, but he was doing his best; they were all doing their best.
‘Have you had a good summer otherwise?’ Lawrence blundered on. ‘Been away at all?’
‘Not really,’ said Cressida.
‘And you’re back in Cambridge, I gather. If you ever want to sing with us . . .’
Cressida made an indeterminate gesture. Never, she thought. She didn’t want anything to do with St Anne’s, with the choir, ever again. ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry, but I . . .’
Slipping past him, she put her cup down on the edge of a table. Enough, she thought. This meant nothing, this part of the proceedings: watering the hordes, her mother would call it. She felt a sudden need for her mother, for the abstracted certainty of her world view and the reassuring chill of the house. Perhaps she would go back to Burcombe tonight. Perhaps she could slip away now without saying any goodbyes. Stephen was the only one she . . . But Stephen would understand. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he wouldn’t even notice.
September 2015
Cressida
Everyone else was up by the time Cressida emerged from her room on Saturday morning. She’d slept soundly: a pleasant surprise, because she disliked strange beds, but she always brought her own pillow when she went away, and she’d packed earplugs too on this occasion. Not that there was much ambient noise up here, apart from the odd owl or fox, but she’d remembered how the sound of voices carried in this house, and she’d suspected – rightly – that others might be awake before her.
Pulling on her clothes (another dress bought for the occasion, a grey linen shift which felt both uncomfortable and inappropriate now), she could hear a buzz of conversation along the corridor and was irritated to find herself rushing. She was curious, of course, to see how things would evolve this morning, and to know whether the atmosphere would feel easier or more claustrophobic now the first encounter was behind them. But there was also an echo of a sense she’d often had twenty years ago, and had recalled clearly last night: the suspicion that she was missing out on something. You could say, she thought with a stab of self-destructive pleasure, that that was the
story of her life.
Those few glorious weeks earlier in the summer when she’d believed that if she wished hard enough for something she could have it seemed like a fantasy now. That wasn’t how it was for her. It never had been. All the things she’d achieved – a place at Cambridge, an academic career – had turned out to be the wrong things, hollow or flawed or simply narrowing her life into a channel that had become more and more limiting. Even the men: most of all the men, she corrected herself. Michael had spread like a fungus through two decades of her life, while the others hadn’t even put down the slenderest of roots.
But then there was . . . She stopped, catching sight of her face in the mirror and seeing fleetingly, disarmingly, a glimpse of the Cressida who’d been here before, all that time ago: a Cressida who’d been, she could see now, more sure of herself than she was now.
But then there was Stephen.
That was so long ago, she told herself, so very long ago, and she had failed to make anything of it then. There was no reason to think . . . But he was divorced; he was more than eligible. There was a hard edge to his life, of course, a slightly chilly competence to replace the awkwardness of the undergraduate, and he moved in such different circles to her. But even so, she thought. Even so it had been clear to her almost at once, when he stepped out of the car on that empty stretch of road last night, that he was still the same man. She’d recognised that stimulating, unsettling hunger; the unexpected flare of his smile. As she shut her bedroom door behind her she allowed a flutter of fancy to tease her mind. Who knew, she thought. Who ever knew what might happen when you weren’t expecting it?
The other four were sitting around the table, and a place had been set for Cressida at the far end. Cereal and toast were laid out – and behind them all, the valley was illuminated by autumn sunshine.
‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten that view.’
‘How did you sleep, Cressida?’ Bill’s voice was very earnest. ‘We were all saying how terrible the beds are.’
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