CHAPTER TWENTY #2
It was a small calf-bound volume, worn at the corners, the spine gone pale with handling. She looked at it and did not touch it.
“What is this?”
“It is the answer to a question you asked me in your morning room four months ago, before we wedded, when you were trying to find one human thing we might have in common, and I closed the door in your face because I did not know how to do anything else.” He put his hands behind his back so that he would not reach for the book and take it away again, which was his every instinct.
“You asked whether I cared for Cowper. I said I was not fond of him. That was a falsehood. It was the most complete fabrication I have ever told, and I told it in three words, because you had offered me a way to feel something where you could see me feel it, and I had been taught since the cradle that to be seen to feel a thing is to hand the world the means of your destruction, and so I closed the door. I have been fond of Cowper my whole life. He is the one poet who ever made the cold rooms I grew up in bearable. Open it.”
She opened it.
The violets were pressed between the leaves at the place the ribbon had marked for four months, three small flowers gone the deep brown of old wine, laid in a row down the gutter of the page with the weight of the closed book holding them flat, exactly where he had put them the night of the wedding.
“They are from your bouquet,” he said, while he still could.
“I took them from it on our wedding night, while you slept on the other side of a door I had not the courage to open, and I pressed them in the one book in the house that meant anything to me, and I told myself it was a sentiment of no consequence, and I have looked at them rather more often in four months than a man looks at a thing of no consequence. My affection for you was born far before I possessed any right to claim it. I sat across from you at that desk and cherished you in silence, even while your brother treated your hand in matrimony as a mere piece of trade, and across a hall while you carried out a vase, and at an altar where your hand was cold, and I could not say one word of it, and I delivered the whole of it to you for four months through doors and servants and unsigned flowers because I was a coward about the one thing in the world I have ever truly been a coward about.” He stopped.
“I am giving you the book because I have run out of doors to push things under. It is the last of my hidden things. There are no others. I have nothing left that you do not know.”
She sat looking down at the pressed violets in the Cowper, and she did not speak for a long time, and he stood and bore the silence, which was its own kind of standing at the window in the cold without his coat.
When she did speak, she did not look up.
“You let me believe, for four months, that I had entered into matrimony with a man who could not feel anything.” Her voice was not steady. “And the whole time you were upstairs reading Cowper to a row of my withered flowers.”
“Yes.”
“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard, and I have had a sad year, so it is a strong field.”
She turned a page past the violets, and another, and he watched her find the marks, the faint pencilled lines drawn in the margins beside this passage and that, different leads, different years, twenty winters of them, a whole life’s worth of feeling set down in the one place on earth no one would ever think to look for it in him.
“You have marked it. All the way through.” Her finger moved down one ruled margin.
“Years of marks. You have been doing this the whole of your life, in a locked room, and presenting the world a man of stone, and the world believed you. I believed you.” She looked up, and her eyes were wet and furious and something underneath the fury that he had not let himself hope for.
“I am not angry that you are cold. I spent four months grieving that you were cold, and I had made a kind of peace with it. I am angry to find out you were never cold at all. That there was all of this, the whole time, and you let me starve six feet from a full table because you could not bear to be seen to lay a place at it.”
She touched one of the violets, very lightly, with the tip of one finger, and did not disturb it. “Why now. Why give it to me now, tonight, when the door is still bolted from my side and I have told you nothing about whether it will open.”
“Because I won a campaign today that you designed, and watched a roomful of men do what you set them to do without ever knowing you had set them, and came home to tell you, and understood on the way that I would rather lose every battle I have left than win one more of them from behind a wall while you sat on the other side of it believing yourself unwanted. The door is yours. I told you that in a garden and I meant it. But I am done leaving you to wonder what is behind it. You may keep the door bolted the rest of our lives and I will keep no secret from you ever again regardless, because the bolt was never the thing that hurt you. The hiding was. And I shall hide no more.”
She closed the book gently, with the violets safe inside it, and held it in her lap with both hands, and then she stood, and crossed the small parlor to where he stood by the door, and looked up at him, and he saw her decide, the way he had once watched her decide to cross a folly threshold and another to bolt a door, the chin coming level, the whole considered weight of her settling on one side of a thing.
“Theodore,” she said.
It was the first time she had used his name.
In four months of matrimony she had called him Your Grace, and sir, and nothing at all, and once, memorably, a great many things across a breakfast table, but never that, never the plain name, and the sound of it in her mouth went through him like the first warmth into a room that has been shut up all winter.
“That is the first time you have called me that,” he said, when he could.
“I know it. I have been saving it.” She set the book down on the table beside them without looking away from him.
“I am going to tell you what I have decided, and you are going to let me finish, and you are not going to manage a single word of it. I have decided that a man who reads Cowper to my withered flowers and cannot say so is a fool, and that a man who learns, at five-and-thirty, against everything three generations beat into him, to stand in a room and hand a woman the last of his hidden things is not a fool at all, but something a great deal rarer, and that I would be a worse fool than you ever were if I bolted a door against him to punish him for the crime of having become, very late and very badly, exactly the man I needed him to be.”
“Ellen.”
“I have not finished. You agreed not to manage it.” But there was the almost-smile, the one she had withheld from him in his study, and this time she did not withhold it.
“The door is decided. It has been decided since the opera, if I am honest, and I let it stay undecided a few days longer only because I wanted to see whether you would try to hurry me, and you did not, which the last thing I needed to know was. It is unbolted. It will stay unbolted. And you are going to read me the Cowper, tonight, aloud, the whole of whatever it is you have been reading to my flowers all this while, because I have spent four months wedded to a man’s silences and I find I should like, at last, to hear what was in them. ”
For a moment he could not answer at all.
He had won a thing that afternoon he had wanted for nine years, and felt at the end of it only the old quiet, the lonely arithmetic coming out even.
He had been handed a thing now that he had not let himself want in thirty, the plain fact of being chosen, in lamplight, with the whole of his hidden things already in her hands and nothing left to trade or to withhold, and what he felt was not quiet in the least. It was the opposite of quiet.
It was the loud, unguarded, ungovernable thing his blood had spent three generations learning to keep carefully pointed at the floor, and he let it come up, and he let it show on his face where she could watch it arrive.
He understood, far too late to be of any use to the man he had been and exactly in time to be of use to the man he might still become, that the two had always been the same thing, and that the keeping of it pointed at the floor had never once kept him safe. It had only kept him cold.
He did not trust his voice for a moment, and did not try to make it do anything clever, because nothing clever was wanted, and he had learned that much at least.
“It is the one about the sofa,” he said. “It is very dull. It goes on about a sofa for a great many lines before it gets anywhere near a feeling.”
“Then we have the whole evening.” She took up the lamp in one hand and his sleeve in the other, the first time she had taken his arm of her own accord since the church, and turned him toward the warmer room where the fire was lit.
“Read me the dull part first. I want the whole of it, Theodore. I have always wanted the whole of it. It is the only thing in this matrimony I ever asked you for.”
And he went where she led him, with the worn Cowper under his arm and her hand in the crook of his elbow and the pressed violets of her wedding bouquet riding safe between the leaves, and he read her the dull part first, and then the rest, late into the night, in a voice he had spent years keeping for no one, and the door between their rooms stood open behind them the whole while, unbolted from both sides at last, and neither of them got up to close it.