Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  He stared at the ceiling, shadowed and sculpted by the darkness. He liked having a puzzle to mull over, and the early morning was usually a good time to worry at things that would seem less ductile later in the day. But he wasn’t used to teasing out psychological puzzles. Emotional puzzles, even. The way to soften a deal or to broker a bid was his territory: how to account for a discrepancy in share price, not mood. The twisting threads of twenty years of life were more baffling than the most complex political and economic data.

  He’d thought last night that singing together had been good for them, but it seemed to him now that it had opened a door that might have been better left shut. Several things had been clear, when the madrigal books had been closed at last: that Cressida was more unhappy than she cared to admit; that Judith and Bill were still tortured by guilt and uncertainty; that Isabel, for all her appearance of tranquil good sense, had been unsettled by the weekend. Or were those, each of them, simplifications too facile to have any meaning?

  And what of himself? What was behind that door for him, except the realisation that his days of maying, of barley break, were behind him? The shadow of Fay, perhaps. The admission that this place and its associations had a stronger hold on him than he’d acknowledged.

  He pushed back the blankets and got out of bed, then went through to the kitchen, where the rain pounded like kettledrums on the Velux window. No early walk this morning, then, unless he wanted to get soaked. Instead he made a cup of tea and took it into the sitting room. Here, too, the noise of the rain was insistent, the light tempered and qualified by the density of cloud and water. None of the peaks were visible this morning, not even Nag’s Pike, but even so he had, in that moment, a powerful sense of the place: the valley, the village, the house, all so little changed, when the four of them had moved on so far. It was always odd, he thought, to find that one could so easily revisit the scenes of the past, but not the past itself: it hardly made sense that certain aspects of what one remembered were still here, while others had vanished completely. It was that conundrum that made memory so painful, he thought. The yearning, the seeking after clues and mementoes, the temptations of nostalgia – singing madrigals, visiting churches – were, in the end, the seeds of self-delusion.

  He smiled then, thinking how little he’d indulged himself in this respect over the years. He’d received the St Anne’s bulletins every year but had never once been to a reunion dinner, and he hadn’t returned to Surbiton since his mother had died and the house had been sold. Even singing had become something to avoid, on the advice of his subconscious. Had he gone too far? Had prudence – at least in emotional matters – ruled his life too firmly? He’d been successful, of course, more than successful, and he’d seen plenty of life. But could he accuse himself of a lack of fulfilment? Had he become too much an island?

  Not everyone was made for pair-bonding, he’d always told himself. It was absurd to judge the success of any human life in those terms, anyway – and if one did, his failure was no greater than Cressida’s or Judith’s, or indeed Bill’s. A marriage of that kind could hardly be held up as a shining example of anything except (and now he permitted himself a rare measure of spite) the fear of being alone. No: he wasn’t persuaded. His watchword, in his personal life, had always been to do no harm, and that he thought he’d managed. Suky – he had made amends with Suky; she was all right. His mother had died regretting the absence of grandchildren, but believing that cancer had snatched her away too soon to see them, and he had done all he could, everything in his power, to make her life happy and comfortable. No one else had any claim on him.

  Except . . . He shook his head quickly, irritably. Clearly that subject would keep coming back today. Was it really possible that Fay had lived all these years wondering whether he was her son, waiting for him to make contact? Was it even conceivable that he was?

  There was a desk in the corner of the sitting room, tucked in beside the aged sofa. He hesitated for a moment, listening for sounds elsewhere in the house, then crossed the room. The top of the desk opened flat, revealing several cubbyholes filled with pens and paper clips and stationery. The top drawer contained ancient receipts and instruction leaflets, and the one below was full of jigsaw puzzles. Stephen inspected the contents methodically, then shut the drawers again, feeling faintly ridiculous.

  What had he been looking for, anyway? Surely any paperwork was more likely to have been kept in Fay’s other house, wherever she’d moved when she sold the place in Newnham. And photographs . . .

  He moved over to the bookcase now, looking among the battered paperbacks and crumbling hardbacks for a photo album. But there was nothing there. Out in the hall there was another bookcase, filled largely with maps and guidebooks, but that too yielded nothing. He was being foolish, Stephen told himself. He’d got caught on a current of sentiment and was allowing it to carry him to places he had no real need to visit. The tantalising shadow of the mother complex – surely he’d put all that to bed long ago?

  After his mother died – his adoptive mother, the only one he’d ever known – he’d wondered whether he should try to trace his birth mother. There were some questions that still nagged at him, he’d realised: about who she was, why she’d given him up, whether she’d thought about him over the years. And if she was indeed Fay, why she had never made herself known. Questions with which he had a curious relationship, both detached and deeply intimate. He’d realised, too, that an array of answers had been waiting in the same dark corner of his mind, cooked up by his subconscious when he wasn’t looking. It had been tempting to try to find out whether any of them came close to the truth, and to tackle the faint echo of guilt, the tiny hook lodged in his heart that made him wonder whether he’d been guilty, all these years, of a sin of omission towards Fay.

  But he hadn’t done it. He couldn’t explain why, except that it had seemed the rational course for a man who was content to be who he was. But he could see now that it had been an emotional, even a romantic decision: that he had never wanted to have his fantastical theory disproved. The memory of that day when he’d come looking for Fay, on the eve of his departure for Dubai, had held him back. The memory of all those painful, squashed emotions.

  And now it was quite possible that he’d know the answers to some of these questions by the end of the day, and that thought filled him with trepidation. It was the unknown, he thought: the unknown bits of himself. That and the fear – absurd now when he was an adult, a prominent man – of exposure in front of his friends; of secrets being revealed over which he had no control. But he had no choice, now. If there was anything in his theory, the lawyer was likely to reveal it. And if he didn’t – then either Stephen’s theory was wrong, or Fay had lived and died without divulging her suspicions, and he must forget all about them.

  Suddenly there seemed a long time to wait, though, until noon. It was only eight thirty: the hours passed very slowly here, he thought, the minutes and the seconds creaking past in the seclusion of the old house. Perhaps he should cook breakfast. He had bought the ingredients yesterday at the shop, locally reared bacon and free-range eggs and other things he hadn’t eaten for years: black pudding and kidneys and hash browns. From the cupboards he selected knives and pans and boards. If the others weren’t up by the time it was ready, he would eat alone and leave the remains in the oven for them.

  But by the time he had finished cooking, everyone had appeared. Judith was last, her hair damp from the shower. Stephen was glad, then, to have been the one to provide not just food but diversion. They lingered over the eating of his feast, glancing now and then at the rain outside but doing their best not to look too plainly at each other. Toast, jam and fruit were appended to the meal, surely not out of hunger. Afterwards, the washing-up was made into a performance too, the kitchen scrubbed clean, and Cressida even found an elderly hoover in a cupboard and pushed it half-heartedly around the sitting room and down the passage. Bill made more coffee and produced a newspaper he had bought th
e day before, spreading the various sections on the coffee table for the others to sample. Isabel built a fire; Judith took a book out of the bookcase and installed herself on the far side of the sitting room from Bill.

  Stephen hesitated for a moment, surveying this domestic scene, for all the world like a wet Sunday morning passing peacefully in a holiday cottage in the Lake District, and admiring the concerted effort that had gone into it. There were some emails he needed to answer, but instead he took the Travel section of the paper and read an article about hotels in Venice. Venice, indeed: there seemed to be traps for the memory everywhere.

  As twelve o’clock approached, the silence in the room became more determined, and the noise of the rain more insistent. Loud enough, in fact, to conceal the approach of the lawyer’s car, so that the first warning they had of his arrival was a rap at the door. Each of them jumped – but it was Judith who was on her feet first, going through to answer it.

  Giles Unwin was less prepossessing than his stand-in from the previous day. A small man, perhaps in his mid-fifties, with thinning hair drawn over his scalp and a Dickensian face, thick-lipped and weak-chinned. Perfect, Stephen thought, for the part he was playing. He looked round at them all when he came into the room, then put his briefcase down on the table and smiled – unctuously, Stephen thought; that was the word.

  ‘I am sorry to have kept you in suspense,’ he began. ‘It was, as you may have guessed, on the instruction of our late client. That is to say – her instructions were that you should all spend the weekend here, and I was left to contrive how best to achieve that.’

  For a moment self-satisfaction flickered across his cautious face – even, perhaps, a flush of excitement about this unusual commission. Then he sat down at the head of the table, leaving them to digest this speech and to decide how to arrange themselves. Judith scowled, but she kept her mouth shut, and sat down next to Stephen. Isabel, with a glance at Bill, withdrew to an armchair in the corner. Cressida hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Would you like some coffee, Mr Unwin?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Unwin cleared his throat: another unconvincing, actorly gesture, Stephen thought. ‘If I could ask you each to identify yourselves, please? Before we begin I should like to be certain that all the legatees are present.’

  With a mixture of eagerness and impatience, they gave their names and produced the passports they had been instructed to bring with them. Unwin looked at each in turn, his eyes resting for a moment on their faces as though he was mentally aligning their features with what he knew of them.

  ‘Very good,’ he said, when they were finished. ‘Well, there’s no need for further delay. I am here, as you are all aware, to acquaint you with the contents of the last will and testament of Fay Elizabeth McArthur, made on the fifteenth of October 1995.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Cressida. ‘Nineteen ninety-five? Why did she . . . Surely there must be a more recent will? Surely she must have updated it sometime between then and now?’

  Giles Unwin gazed at her, unblinking.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘There was no opportunity to revise the will. Fay McArthur died two days after she had signed it.’

  Part VII

  October 1992

  Fay

  Coming into the familiar room, Fay hesitated for a moment. The smell of the St Anne’s Master’s Lodge hadn’t changed in all the time she’d known it. There was always that sweetish scent: a faint waft of decay, endlessly deferred but never conquered for good, overlaid with wood smoke and sherry and – the specifics altering with each new generation of undergraduates – a draught of cheap perfume. The boys often smelled stronger than the girls these days, she’d noticed. They dressed their hair with gel and wax: some of them did, anyway. Not so often the ones who sang in the choir.

  Just ahead she recognised the new choral scholars, whom she’d identified earlier in the chapel – cassock-less now, and laughing at something one of them had said. A nice group, she thought. A very tall boy who looked as though he hadn’t quite got used to his height yet, listening attentively to what was being said. A shorter, squarer, ginger-haired boy with an affable air of self-confidence. And three girls, all unalike: one blonde in what Fay recognised as the patrician style; one strikingly beautiful, perhaps with Middle Eastern blood; one plump and smiling, with a face one would instantly warm to. She took a step towards them, wondering if it would seem strange to introduce herself, but before she could do so the Master swept up to her, bearing a glass of sherry.

  ‘Fay. I’m so glad you could come.’

  ‘Hello, Jeremy.’ Her least favourite cousin, she called him. It was only partly a joke: he was, in any case, her only cousin. ‘How are you liking it here?’

  Jeremy’s appointment as Master of her old college had both amused and infuriated Fay. She could see that she might enjoy her association with St Anne’s a little less from now on, even if she was invited more often – but she didn’t mean to let Jeremy interfere with her particular pleasures. She was willing to bet that he rarely went to evensong, anyway.

  ‘You’ll have to help me decorate,’ Jeremy said, with a sweep of his hand that took in red brocade and wood panelling and murky green paint. ‘You know Elspeth hates that sort of thing.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Fay. He laughed, and she said: ‘You don’t need to bother with me, Jeremy. I know most of these people.’

  ‘You know the Fellows better than I do, you mean.’ He laughed again, joyously, to show that he didn’t believe this statement for a moment. ‘Say hello to Elspeth, won’t you. She’s over there somewhere.’

  As Jeremy glided away, Fay turned to inspect one of the pictures on the wall – a Rowlandson watercolour of St Anne’s that used to hang in the Combination Room rather than the Master’s Lodge, she was sure – and caught a fragment of conversation from the group of choral scholars.

  ‘You can talk, Bill,’ the dark beauty was saying. ‘You didn’t quite seem to have that psalm under control.’

  ‘It was pointed differently at the cathedral,’ the redhead protested.

  ‘I loved that anthem,’ said the plump girl. ‘I absolutely loved it.’

  ‘You love everything, Marmion,’ said the blonde. ‘You . . .’

  A gale of laughter from the other side of the room drowned the rest of the sentence, and Fay moved away then, before they suspected her of eavesdropping. Marmion: was that Walter Scott? An unusual name. They seemed rather charming, she thought. So young; they were all so young these days. She felt a stab of sorrow, and dispelled it firmly.

  ‘Fay!’

  She turned to see Lawrence Watts, the Director of Music.

  ‘Hello, Lawrence. Lovely service this evening: you must be pleased.’

  Lawrence gave the smile of a man who couldn’t quite believe his own good fortune.

  ‘Wonderful new recruits,’ he said. ‘Choral scholars. So talented. Going to make a real . . . Here they are, in fact. Let me – ladies and gentlemen, can I introduce Fay McArthur?’

  They turned, five open, ardent faces.

  ‘Bill,’ said Lawrence, indicating the ginger-haired boy, ‘Stephen’ – the taller boy – ‘Judith, Marmion, Cressida’ – dark, plump, fair. ‘Fay is a – friend and patron of the choir.’

  Fay smiled, demurring. Lawrence didn’t know she was an alumna, and she was grateful for that. If he had mentioned it, the fact that she’d been in St Anne’s very first intake of women in 1970, she would have felt obliged, out of fastidiousness, to say that she had never graduated – and she much preferred not to. Jeremy, she thought, might – but Jeremy wouldn’t want to acknowledge her prior claim on the college. He had never quite got over the fact that he hadn’t got into Cambridge at eighteen. All his success, Fay often thought, all his eminence, had been achieved on the back of that needling failure.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ said the girl called Marmion. ‘Do you often come to evensong?’

  ‘Once or twice a week,’ said Fay. ‘I only
live round the corner, in Newnham. Are you all enjoying St Anne’s?’

  She sounded like an old fogey, she thought. A maiden aunt. But they liked being asked about themselves.

  ‘Enormously,’ said the blonde girl – Cressida, Fay repeated in her head. She had a slightly fractious look, on closer inspection, but it was overlaid with happiness at the moment. The others nodded and murmured assent.

  ‘And have you all sung before?’ Fay asked.

  ‘Not really,’ said the tall boy. Stephen. ‘Bill’s miles ahead of the rest of us – he was a cathedral chorister.’

  ‘I’ve never sung anything like this,’ said Marmion. ‘But it’s wonderful.’

  ‘Well, you’ve made a difference to the choir already,’ Fay said. ‘I look forward to following your progress.’

  *

  She didn’t mean to stay long; one glass of college sherry was enough. She exchanged a few words with one of the Fellows, said hello to the organ scholar and was waylaid by the librarian, who had been a couple of years below her at St Anne’s, then put her glass down on the table and started towards the door. The new choral scholars were in the middle of the room still, talking ravenously, their eyes shooting from one face to another. If you were painting this scene, Fay thought, they would be at the centre of it. She imagined them captured by Titian or Raphael, their faces radiant against the well-worn background of academic life.

  ‘They must be proud of you, your adoptive parents,’ she heard Marmion say as she passed: startled, she couldn’t help glancing back. ‘Are they coming up for your birthday?’