But it was too late: the bird was off again, thrashing and crashing around the room, its frantic movements making a sound like a tiny tornado. It was strangely terrifying: a blackbird, frightened out of its wits, the beat and brush of its wings flicking past one person and then another.
‘Shall I open a window?’ suggested Stephen. ‘Would it find its way out?’
‘How did it get in?’ wailed Cressida.
‘Down the chimney,’ said Isabel. ‘Probably down the chimney. It’s a crow.’
‘That’s a bad omen, a crow in the house,’ said Judith. ‘It’s a portent of death.’
It was impossible to tell from her tone of voice whether she was mocking them. Bill looked away; he didn’t want to see what the others were thinking.
Stephen had got the window open, but the bird was at the far end of the room now, buffeting against the paintings on the wall. After another few moments it dropped, exhausted, onto the back of the sofa.
‘Keep still,’ Bill said, and he sidled up to the bird quietly, sideways on, then dropped his hands to cover it, closing his fingers tight around its wings. ‘There. Safe now.’
The creature’s heart beat furiously inside its warm little body, but it didn’t struggle as he picked it up and carried it across the room. Its feathers felt soft, almost silky: it was hard to imagine it as that jagged, battering dervish that had flung itself about the room a few minutes before.
The kitchen door was still open. Standing on the step, Bill released his hands, and the bird vanished into the trees with a final fluster of wings and sharp feet.
‘Well done,’ said Stephen, when he returned. ‘I’d forgotten you knew about birds.’
‘I don’t,’ said Bill. ‘But that wasn’t a crow. Not big enough, and it had an orange beak. It was a blackbird.’
‘Well, I don’t know what a blackbird in the house signifies, I’m afraid,’ said Judith.
Cressida looked at her with a flash of antipathy. ‘In the medieval bestiary,’ she said, ‘the blackbird represents the temptations of the flesh.’
And then, blushing deeply, she rushed out of the room.
October 1995
Bill
The entryphone at the bottom of Judith’s block was broken, and the front door had been left on the latch. Bill pushed it open and climbed the stairs, his footsteps echoing off the concrete walls.
He’d been to the Guildhall today, but only because he had nothing else to do, after the funeral on Friday and a torturous weekend at home. He couldn’t see himself finishing the course, but for now he hardly cared what he did to pass the days. All he cared about – all he could think about – was Judith. They’d avoided each other at the funeral, and over the weekend he’d resisted the telephone, although he’d hardly been able to bear wondering what she might be doing or thinking. He’d felt, understood, that an interval was necessary. A watershed. But he was sure – as sure as he dared, hoped, struggled to be – that she must be expecting to see him. Perhaps not exactly now, but how was he to decide, except by testing the limits of his own patience? There was no algorithm for this situation; no established social convention.
Flat 13 was on the fourth floor. By the time he reached it, Bill was sure his intrusion must have been detected and that a caretaker or the resident vigilante would be waiting on the landing, but there was nothing except a row of shoes outside one door and a folded bicycle beside another. He knocked, and the door was answered by a short, blonde girl. Of course there were other people living here; he’d forgotten that.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘The buzzer’s not working. Is this where Judith lives?’
The girl hesitated for a moment, then pulled the door back to let him in.
‘Judith?’ she called. ‘Someone for you.’
Judith was wearing pyjamas made from some silky, satiny material which shimmered and swooped over her smooth curves.
‘Hello,’ she said. There was a shaft of irony in her voice, but not of surprise. No glimmer of a qualm, either, but Bill saw with pain how tired she looked.
*
It was only the third time they’d had sex: that thought flitted through Bill’s mind, incongruously banal, as they lay together in the narrow single bed in blessed post-coital exhaustion. It was an extraordinary relief, he thought, half thought, for the burden of need and desire to be briefly assuaged. And Judith had been as eager and as voracious as him: they hadn’t waited for a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, a decorous pause. He had kissed her on the doorstep, not caring who saw, then followed her to her room, mesmerised by the movement of her hips and the thick gleam of her hair.
It occurred to him now that Judith’s scruples at the beginning of the summer had turned out to be a blessing, and their restraint these last three months a saving grace. At last something to be grateful for, he thought, and through the regret and remorse he felt a warming surge of hope. And then he lifted his hand an inch, encountering Judith’s ribcage and the soft overhang of her breast, and everything else was banished.
‘Judith,’ he said. ‘Oh, Judith, I love you.’
She kissed him gently, lightly, then more seriously. But as he shifted himself back on top of her, she said: ‘You can’t.’
He froze then, and she gave a little smile. ‘Not that,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean . . . but you can’t love me. We can’t love each other. Not now.’
‘Of course we can.’ He slid off her again, his erection gone, his heart beating fast. ‘I know it’s complicated, Judith, but there’s no reason –’
‘Yes, there is.’ Judith lifted a hand to stroke his face. ‘I’m afraid there is.’
‘That’s bollocks,’ he said. ‘It’s a terrible thing, a terrible situation, and believe me I feel . . . But there’s no point punishing ourselves. We can’t undo what’s happened.’
‘No.’
He pushed himself up on one elbow, trying to see her from a different angle, to catch the meaning behind her words. What was she . . .? What did he . . .?
‘I need to be with you,’ he said. ‘I can’t manage without you. I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life.’
Judith didn’t take her eyes off his face, but she didn’t speak again. Bill gazed back at her. Her dark hair was dazzling against the white sheets and her face soft and flushed: his heart’s desire, within his grasp but suddenly, bewilderingly, unattainable. Nothing had made sense, he thought, since that weekend in June. Nothing, nothing had happened as he could have expected.
And then, in the silence, he heard Marmion’s mother’s voice: It isn’t right to lie about our feelings. It seemed to Bill now that he had no idea, really no idea, whether he was speaking the truth – to Judith, or to himself. Everything had seemed so clear earlier, so clearly pointing to a resolution, a consummation of desires that were burned into his flesh and his soul. But the tangle in his chest couldn’t be given the names of any human emotions Mrs Hayter might recognise. It bore no relation to the sweet simplicity the world called love.
Perhaps there was no truth to tell, he thought. There was just an inverting loop of longing and guilt and self-loathing that he would never resolve, never follow through from one end to the other without finding himself on the opposite side.
September 2015
Judith
Judith was aware that she was behaving badly. There were plenty of reasons for it, plenty of excuses, but that wasn’t really the point. The deferral of the lawyer’s visit, the rain, the frustration of feeling helpless in this peculiar web Fay had spun – none of that was very much to the point. What was unsettling her was much closer to home.
The drama of the blackbird had at least broken the spell of forced civility and allowed them all to draw apart for a while. Isabel had seized on another lull in the rain to take Bill out for a walk, and Cressida and Stephen had gone off in his car to buy food for supper. Judith had announced her intention to have a bath, but once she’d been left alone in the house she’d found
she didn’t have the heart for it. High Scarp had a beautiful old-fashioned bath with claw feet and a rolled edge, the kind you could float in if you drew your knees up, and she remembered it vividly: she remembered Marmion emerging, draped in towels, from another long soak, her cheeks pink and her hair damp and tousled.
It wasn’t rational to be haunted by Marmion, when Isabel was alive and present and manifestly eager to hold onto Bill, but the sense she’d had this morning of being out of kilter with Isabel’s world worked both ways. In Judith’s world, it was Marmion she had stolen Bill from; Marmion whose death had scuppered their hopes; Marmion whose presence in this house still complicated everything. Or was that another fluent stream of self-deception? Of course she could still conjure the love, the anger, the guilt – all the long-submerged emotions Marmion had left her with. But did they have anything to do with the present? Did she really know what she wanted now, or why she’d acted as she had twenty years ago? Perhaps she was simply seeking to excuse the decision she’d made back then – and to justify a hesitancy that might be no more than cowardice.
Out in the hall the cuckoo clock struck six. Soon they would have to gather again, and endure another evening under Fay’s watchful, imagined eye. Judith moved restlessly around her room, looking but not touching, as though an alarm might trigger if she interfered with the stage set Fay had left behind. At the window she paused, glimpsing two figures who might be Bill and Isabel trailing up the path behind the house. A tremor went through her: partly a shiver of disbelief, and partly a thrill of desire.
Beneath the histrionic reversals of mood there was, she admitted, something she could no longer deny: an alteration in her feelings. Or perhaps not alteration, but – clarification. No, not even that. All she knew was that something inside was full of fire, so that any touch could ignite her skin, and when she spoke, smoke and flame poured out of her mouth.
Desire was a mysterious, an unreasonable, an excessive thing, she thought. It was impossible to account for it; to mark out its coordinates. But among the clutter and incident of the last twenty-four hours – that first meeting on the doorstep last night, then the uncomfortable evening and the encounter in the small hours when the bleak infinity of starlight had filled her head; the walk to the church, the sparring over legal detail, the pub lunch, the visit to Troutbeck – among it all, she could see moments of radiance: a trail of stars alight in her head now like a constellation. Bill blushing last night, just after they’d arrived, when she mentioned Marmion, and then feeling his eyes on her as she talked to Isabel, and knowing that they would be on her all weekend. His confession of love, late at night – too hasty, too direct for her at the time, but now she could see that it had been the acknowledgement of an irresistible fact. And then, at Townend, that brushing of arms in the doorway which she had known beyond all doubt he’d felt too, and Bill standing so close behind her afterwards so that she could almost feel his breath on her neck. She had never felt any of this for Arvind, nor for Jonty. She had settled for too little, her mother had always said. She had never dared to risk anything more, to raise her hopes.
She heard herself, then, searing the air with her words: That’s a bad omen, a crow in the house. And Cressida’s retort, a few moments later: The blackbird represents the temptations of the flesh. Oh, that little bird, held softly in his hands. That wild, terrified, flailing thing stilled, soothed, at peace. How could she not wish for that stillness for herself?
*
Supper that night was a subdued affair. Cressida and Stephen had bought lamb chops and a tray of sticky toffee pudding at the village shop, but their pleasure in producing a meal for everyone was muted. Judith, for one, had nothing to say for herself at all; no fire to breathe tonight.
Afterwards, the moment she had been dreading all weekend came to pass. Strangely, it was Isabel who suggested it. Did she think she was doing them all a favour, Judith wondered, or was this another calculated risk? She felt sure that Isabel had realised what she was up against. If she hadn’t known before, something about today had alerted her.
‘Would anyone like to do some singing?’ she asked. ‘I found some sheet music in the cupboard by the piano.’
‘Why not?’ said Stephen. ‘What is there?’
This was a terrible idea, Judith thought. She had abandoned even the Bach Choir this last couple of years, and who knew whether the others still sang. She couldn’t bear them to defile anything they’d sung together before. But perhaps it would be worse if they shied away from it now. Certainly if she refused to join in.
Stephen held up a madrigal book. ‘Any takers?’ he said. ‘I know madrigals were never our strong point, but we could have a go.’
Judith couldn’t tell whether his enthusiasm was genuine or not, but it seemed to convince Cressida.
‘Is “The Silver Swan” in there?’ she asked.
Stephen flicked to the index. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Scored for SSATB too, so we can manage that, if . . .’
‘I don’t mind singing alto,’ said Cressida.
Christ, thought Judith. Was it bravery or merely a flagrant assertion of innocence, offering to take Marmion’s part – and proposing the piece that carried with it perhaps the most sentimental attachment of any in that book? Why not something about the springtime, the only pretty ringtime, rather than Gibbons’s plangent, heartfelt lament? Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes – could they really sing that, in the place where Marmion had sung her last, and sung no more? But the others seemed intent; even Bill was making no objection.
‘OK,’ she said, taking a copy from Stephen. ‘OK.’
The second soprano part was too low for her, but the upper part was more exposed than she cared to attempt, and too fraught with memory.
‘You can have the top line,’ she said to Isabel.
They were all on their feet now, standing in a circle around the piano. Bill played the opening chord, and then suddenly they were singing. Singing different parts, with different voices than they’d had before, but even so Judith felt an irresistible pulse of joy as she reached the run of quavers that introduced the second line; felt something yield between them as she and Stephen began the third together and the overlapping threads of harmony were teased out between them; felt a deep thrill of satisfaction as they settled at last on the final chord, underpinned by Stephen’s sonorous bottom F. Isabel’s voice was too operatic for the floating high notes, but that was all right, that was a saving grace. So was her show of pleasure at the end, her smiles and thanks: they allowed everyone else to say nothing.
Goodness, thought Judith. My goodness, that was nice. The music, the singing of it, seemed to have swallowed up, dissolved, embraced so much. It had carried them all along so willingly on its rising lines, its swooping melody that pulled them apart and then drew them back together again. She had forgotten the joy and satisfaction of singing like this, feeling that you weren’t just joining in but creating something that depended on each one of you to bring it to life. And feeling beneath, above, within the notes so much being shared, being said. Even Marmion’s absence, the richness of her contralto missing from the texture, conveyed something profound and particular that it would have been almost impossible to express in words: a lingering, bittersweet melancholy that encompassed the joy of recovering something deeply important to them all. It was almost unbearable; almost more than her heart, her mind, could allow.
But for the moment it was enough to let the music speak for itself. Judith smiled, and caught Bill’s eye, and he smiled too. She remembered him, then, singing the solo in ‘Blue Moon’, and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ – oh, and so many other songs that had been at their fingertips in those days, ready to be produced at the end of an evening.
‘Another?’ asked Stephen, and they murmured yes, certainly, why not, and flicked on through the book recognising, remembering.
‘What about “Come Gentle Swains”?’ suggested Cressida. ‘That’s in five parts too.’
‘Long live fair Oriana,’ said Bill. ‘Very good: I think we could manage that.’
This piece was more restrained, a delicate filigree of lace rather than the sumptuous velvet and flowing silk of ‘The Silver Swan’, but as it danced nimble-footed to its ringing conclusion, it too called up a recollection so deep it was almost a folk memory.
‘Ridiculous music,’ said Stephen when they’d finished, in the tone of voice a father might use to acknowledge his pleasure in a new baby, failing to disguise the disconcerting power of its grip on his heart. Isabel was apologising for a note that had been a little sharp; no one took any notice of her.
After that they sang ‘Construe My Meaning’ and ‘Sing We at Pleasure’ and ‘All Creatures Now Are Merry-Minded’, with a thrill of gratification each time that they could read their way through them with reasonable competence: with a sense that this, this was what they could do, all of them, to make sense of things. Even so, Judith was relieved that both ‘Draw on, Sweet Night’ and ‘Sleep, Fleshly Birth’, each of them poignantly melancholic, turned out to have six parts, and was happy to end on a bumptious note with ‘Now is the Month of Maying’. Who would ever have imagined, she thought, as they made an exaggerated rallentando through the final chorus, that singing madrigals could give them such profound and such grateful pleasure? The idea of them all, back in 1995, spying on their future selves singing fa la la la la with earnest delight, almost made her laugh out loud. But the future was always mysterious; always a surprise. Perhaps, she thought, it was just as well that none of them could see further than this moment.
September 2015
Stephen
It was, again, barely dawn when Stephen woke, but it felt this morning like a different season; a different place. What light there was, creeping around the thick curtains and under the door, was bluish and cold, and as he lay half-awake in the unfamiliar bed he felt a potent sense of sadness. In his mind he replayed the memory of the evening before, the jollity of the madrigal singing, and his melancholy perplexed him at first. Now is the month of maying, he thought – not that it was, exactly – but despite the smiles and the pleasure of the singing, merry lads and bonny lasses they were not. He was not, anyway.
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