Every Secret Thing

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘It looks rather steep,’ said Marmion.

  ‘You’ve had a few warm-ups,’ said Fay. That was hardly true, but if she could do it, they certainly could. They would thank her when they got to the top. Her last gift to them, she thought, and she managed a smile. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.’

  *

  She had taken them the wrong way, Fay knew. She should have brought a map. That was the first rule: always bring a map, even if you know the route well – and she didn’t know this route well. They had come through a bog, encountered a barbed-wire fence, scrambled their way over loose scree. None of them except Bill had proper walking boots, and his looked too new to be comfortable. This grand idea of hers had proved more mad than marvellous, but she certainly wasn’t going to give up, and nor were they. Once or twice Bill had suggested turning back, but she’d held fast. And now, she thought with a burst of exultation, they were on a path, a rather narrow path winding round the side of the steep slope, but one that would surely lead them to the summit.

  The great thing, Fay thought, was that she felt so well. She’d taken a double dose of painkillers before they left, and an extra anti-emetic, and a couple of steroids for good measure, and the cocktail had definitely made her feel better. The fresh air, too. The exercise. Don’t push yourself too hard, she heard Dr Oblonski saying. What did he know? Pushing herself seemed to be exactly the right thing to do. That slight light-headedness was surely no greater than you’d expect, the result of exertion and ascent.

  Far below, the valley glistened in the sunlight. Fay could see three or four farms, each squat and grey and compact, and the silver slug-trail of the river. She felt a sense of triumph that wasn’t just about conquering the tumour, dispelling her symptoms, but about conquering Nag’s Pike, too. She’d always been afraid of it, but here they were almost at the top. The sun was shining and all was right with the world.

  The group had strung itself out along the path, each of them finding their own pace. Fay found herself walking with Stephen, neither of them speaking much, but his proximity gave her pleasure. She’d always been especially fond of Stephen. It wasn’t simply the fact that he was adopted, although that – she’d hugged that to her, sometimes, hoping that her boy, her precious lost boy, was as happy and as promising as Stephen. But more than that, she’d recognised in him something of herself: that sense of not belonging, of secrets fiercely kept, questions unanswered, hopes barely acknowledged. He stopped now to take a bottle of water out of his backpack and offered it to her.

  ‘I don’t know quite how I got to carry this all the way,’ he said. ‘I should have palmed it off on Bill when we stopped.’

  ‘He can carry it down again,’ said Fay, handing the bottle back. ‘Thank you; that was a good idea.’

  While Stephen drank she gazed out at the expanse of air between here and the next peak – the playground of falcons. Her father had taught her to recognise the different species that frequented the dale: the larger size of the peregrine, the smoother flight of the merlin, the effortless hovering of the kestrel. They had stood for hours, his hand on her shoulder. Fay felt an urge now to pass on this knowledge to Stephen; to all of them. She loved them all, she thought suddenly. She loved them almost too much to bear. Marmion with her wide eyes and Judith with her sharp tongue, Cressida who had turned out to be cleverer than she could have guessed and Bill who could sing anything, anything you put in front of him. Shining lights, all of them, but she couldn’t feel easy about them; couldn’t help wishing there was more she could do for them. There wasn’t much time left, but today she would like to point out a silhouette dark against the sun, so that they could stand together and watch as it crested the valley, riding on the vectors of the wind. So that they would remember her whenever they saw a falcon in flight. But there were none around today; nothing but emptiness to fill the heat of the day.

  ‘Ready?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Fay pushed away the image of wings spread, spirits soaring. Perhaps on the way down, she thought. Perhaps there would be a raptor to point out then. ‘Yes, let’s go on.’

  She was glad now that there wasn’t far to go. She felt weary all of a sudden, her legs reluctant to move without a conscious effort. Soon, she was sure, they would see the little cairn that marked the summit. She imagined them all standing round it, posing for a photograph, beaming with pleasure at their achievement.

  ‘Steady,’ said Stephen, as she stumbled over a loose stone, and she smiled to conceal the jab of pain in her head.

  After a few more yards they came round a large boulder that blocked the path ahead from view – and there, taking advantage of its shelter, was a couple pressed together in a frantic embrace.

  For a second Fay stared. Bill and Judith. Judith and Bill, clasped together like lovers. She just had time to register the shock of seeing them, and to hear her voice calling out in surprise and protest, and then the image dissolved, and – her mind operating, it seemed, in some kind of slow motion – she understood that they had lost their footing and slipped, that Judith was falling, falling, falling.

  *

  Standing over the calamitous scene, Fay could feel her brain condensing, focusing in on one thing. She was in charge; it was her responsibility to act. It was necessary to put everything else aside – the guilt and horror and disbelief, the fear for Judith’s life, the fierce throbbing that had started up in her head – and plot a course through the next minute, the next hour. Judith was alive, but unconscious. They couldn’t afford to wait and see whether she came round. There were other things happening, a thread of violent distress that had nothing to do with Judith’s condition, but she must keep all that out of her mind for now.

  ‘I’ll go for help,’ she said. ‘Someone needs to come with me.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Cressida. She looked resolute: the right expression, Fay thought.

  ‘They’ll send a helicopter,’ Fay said. ‘When you hear it, wave something. Make sure it sees you.’

  ‘I could come too,’ Stephen offered, but Fay glanced at Bill and at Marmion and shook her head. For a moment her eyes held Marmion’s, and in them she read both shock and accusation. It was her fault, she thought: her fault that Judith had fallen, that Marmion had discovered . . . But again she wrenched her gaze, her focus, back to what must be done.

  ‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ she said.

  She and Cressida set off at double the pace they had managed before.

  ‘Careful,’ she said, as Cressida stumbled. ‘We don’t want another accident.’

  She had an idea where the closest farm was, a remnant of memory she wasn’t sure she could trust. But what was she to trust, otherwise?

  ‘Let’s cut down here,’ she said, when they reached a dry-stone wall. ‘Can you manage?’

  ‘Of course.’ Cressida’s face was scarlet: hers must be too, Fay thought.

  Miraculously, serendipitously, the wall ran straight down to a farmhouse half hidden in a fold of the landscape. Fay had lost all sense of time by now, but surely they had been quicker than anyone could have expected. They ran across the last field, through the farmyard and up to the front door. An old, old man opened it, and the story poured out of them.

  ‘There’s been an accident, up on the fell. We need to use the phone. Someone’s injured and we need to call for help.’

  September 2015

  Stephen

  Through the window, Stephen could see Bill and Isabel wandering in the garden, stopping now and then to inspect a plant. Taking an inventory, he thought. This was certainly the moment for that, for all of them.

  It seemed to him that although they’d dispersed after the lawyer left, moving off to separate rooms and separate pursuits, they were connected now – reconnected – in a way they hadn’t been earlier. They’d all been drawn back within the compass of Fay’s gravitational pull – or perhaps their own. Perhaps what they shared had finally come to bear its full weight.

  He examined that i
dea for a moment. Maybe it was no more than the sense of connection you sometimes had with the rest of the audience at the end of a play – or an opera, indeed. The Valkyries had done something similar for him, hadn’t they? But this was the beginning, not the end, he thought. When they all left this evening, or tomorrow morning, it wouldn’t be to part from strangers they had no expectation of seeing again. They would have to communicate, to negotiate. They would have to meet, every year.

  It would be odd to share something as solid as a house with other people. He and Suky had only managed a rented flat, and since then – since then he had been very careful what he shared with anyone. Which of them would take the lead? he wondered. He could imagine Isabel directing things rather effectively from behind the scenes. She and Bill lived the closest; presumably they were most likely to use the place. And Cressida, of course: Cressida might bring study groups up here for earnest weekends of poetry.

  And as for Judith, who knew? He still wasn’t sure what to make of that impulsive gesture half an hour before: whether it was a glimpse of suppressed passion or the reckless performance of a toddler confused by its surroundings. It had seemed to indicate a willingness to throw in her lot with the rest of them, though, and he had found it persuasive in a way that histrionic scenes rarely were. He’d been surprised that he was still capable of making decisions on emotional grounds, of assenting without a proper weighing of pros and cons. No doubt he’d resort, as he often did, to substituting his credit card for his time, making a semi-detached commitment to this joint venture – but would it be like that? he wondered now. Would it be possible to remain at one remove?

  He ought to be a little closer now to knowing what it really meant, all of this. Meeting the others again, revisiting the past, reopening questions he’d closed off a long time ago. When he’d thought about them all, over the years – and God knows he hadn’t done it very often – there had occasionally been a brief, sharp pang of yearning, as though they were his family: another family he’d turned his back on, or who had turned their backs on him. The same yearning he got listening to Kathleen Ferrier, and for no more rational a reason. He had always . . . This was absurd, he knew, but he had a memory, perhaps a faux-memory, of her voice, that particular aria, from his very early life, and there had been no records like that in Surbiton. Finding it here, in the shelf beside the turntable, immediately after Giles Unwin’s departure, had felt like an intervention of providence, though perhaps it was merely an example of divine irony.

  He’d wanted Fay’s will to explain things, he admitted. He’d wanted a denouement. Instead there was only further mystery, in the shape of that twenty-year delay – and certainly no mention of Fay having a child. Stephen had to accept that that idea had been a fantasy, wishing into existence a connection between him and Fay, however tenuous: she a lost mother, he a lost son.

  It would be easy to allow himself to feel lost again now. Let down again. It would be easy to feel angry at the sense that they were being played with from a safe distance, from twenty years in the past. But couldn’t it also be read, this bequest, as an attempt to make them into a family? Fay’s family, left behind to keep High Scarp going?

  He almost laughed, then, at his perversity. His sentimentality, buried so deep he could almost pretend it wasn’t there. Foolishness, he told himself. Nostalgia. He flipped open his laptop then and started scanning through the ranks of messages in his inbox. Here was reality, he told himself: a hundred and twenty new emails on a Sunday afternoon. A hundred and twenty decisions, suggestions, opportunities. This was what he was good at, what gave his life direction and purpose.

  When Cressida came into the room twenty minutes later he was deeply engrossed, drafting a memo about the proposed expansion of an infrastructure project in China. He registered a dash of irritation at being interrupted, but after a moment’s reluctance, a moment’s hesitation, he shut the lid of the computer and smiled.

  ‘Good walk?’ he asked.

  ‘Lovely. You should have come.’

  Cressida looked better for the fresh air, her cheeks pink and her hair dishevelled in a way that made its artificial colour less apparent.

  ‘I should,’ he said. ‘I’ve been dealing with email.’

  She leant against the back of a chair, but made no move to sit down. ‘I can’t quite imagine you as a mogul,’ she said. ‘Is that what you are?’

  Stephen laughed. ‘That’s one word for it, I suppose.’

  ‘I didn’t mean – I’m sure you’re very good at it. It must be exciting, your life.’

  ‘Not as exciting as it sounds, perhaps.’ Stephen hesitated. ‘It’s . . . I don’t know. What’s life for? How do you know if you’re any good at it?’

  Listen to him, he thought: he never spoke like this. It was the effect of that mawkish introspection earlier – and of Cressida’s questions; her cool gaze. She’d always made him feel as though he ought to be somebody slightly different. Looking at her now, he recognised something else that made him uneasy: an expression he’d seen too often recently on other faces. Women of forty, seeing him as a last chance. He wouldn’t group Cressida with them, but . . . Cressida was the only woman he’d ever slept with, he reminded himself, apart from Suky. So long ago that the memory was barely a shadow, but he was sure she hadn’t forgotten. Poor Cressida: he was sure she hadn’t forgotten how callously he’d treated her afterwards, either.

  ‘It’s been good to see you again, Cressida,’ he said, warmth and reason carefully titrated in his voice. ‘I can just imagine you as the Professor of Poetry.’

  ‘I’m certainly not that.’ She looked affronted: that was unexpected. She stared out of the window for a moment, then turned to look at him.

  ‘What you said just now – about what it means to be good at life. That’s something . . . It’s the question for all of us, isn’t it? We’ve all done well enough, but none of us . . . Well, I can’t speak for you.’

  She frowned. The luminosity the walk had given her skin had faded again, and Stephen felt a sudden compassion for her. Would it be so very wrong, he wondered, to offer what he could see she wanted? Might it even . . . He could recall the reasons for marrying Suky more clearly, just now, than the reasons for separating, although of course – but a mariage blanc, he thought. Would that be enough for Cressida? Would it give him . . .? And then, like the flick of a switch in his head, reason returned. No. No, no. What had he been thinking? He felt dizzy for a moment at the thought of the precipice so narrowly avoided. Cressida’s eyes were on his face still, and he had the impression that she had followed, had understood, every nuance of his train of thought. She looked steadily at him for a moment longer, and then she smiled: a smile that contained both sadness and prudence and a flicker of amusement.

  ‘I don’t have any chance with you, do I, Stephen?’ she said.

  ‘I’m very much afraid you don’t,’ he said. ‘Not that it’s – anything personal. A general preference rather than an individual one.’

  Cressida nodded. She looked suddenly younger, he thought. ‘I rather wish I’d known that twenty years ago,’ she said. ‘It would have made life simpler. But there it is.’

  She made a little movement, a little sound that could have been a laugh or a sob, and he felt it echoing inside him, finding similar empty spaces in his head, his chest, and illuminating them for a moment before it died away.

  Cressida turned back to the window, where the great panorama of the valley was laid out, Nag’s Pike sharp and clear in the centre of it.

  ‘But you’ll sign the document?’ she asked. ‘You’ll come back next year?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘Good.’ Her shoulders dropped; a visible discharge of tension. ‘Good. I’m very glad.’

  ‘Might you come up here before then?’ he asked. ‘In the Christmas vacation, perhaps, if everything has gone through by then?’

  ‘Possibly.’ She swung back to look at him, and he had t
he impression that she was seeing him clearly for the first time; seeing other things, too, perhaps. There was an animation in her face now that he hadn’t seen for a long time, a glimmer of possibility that lent grace to her features. ‘But I might go to Norway,’ she said.

  ‘A conference?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘Just a holiday. And to look up a friend.’

  *

  Left alone again, Stephen felt deflated. That wasn’t what he should feel, when the encounter with Cressida had been resolved so easily and so cordially in the end, and when his rejection seemed, perversely, to have left her happier. But perhaps it was that glimpse of happiness in her face, wherever it had come from, that had left him feeling the opposite.

  His sexuality had never been publicly declared, even if it had never been actively concealed. Turning it over in his head now, he understood that he’d always thought of himself as someone without much appetite for that aspect of life – and that he’d been reassured by that judgement. His marriage had demonstrated quite clearly his unsuitability for heterosexual partnerships, and the occasional brief forays in the other direction, whilst headyingly pleasurable at the time, had left surprisingly little regret when they were finished.

  But that moment when he’d conjured a shared future for him and Cressida, however outlandish the idea had been, had made him feel . . . enlarged, he thought. A sensation Wordsworth would have been able to express better than him. An elevation of the spirit; a sense of possibility and connection. Possibility and connection were his bread and butter in the world of markets and finance, but it seemed to him suddenly that something else had been offered to him this weekend: that this was the moment to seize a commodity that had eluded him all his life.

  An image of Suky in that white dress at Micklethorpe came into his head at that moment – and then, like the detail in a photograph that he had failed to see properly before, the boy with the handbell, ringing the audience in from their picnic. A dark-haired boy a few years younger than him, in a dinner jacket a couple of sizes too big. He shut his eyes for a few moments and let his mind drift back to the warmth of that summer evening, the faint smell of roses, and the sound of that bell, summoning, summoning.