Saving Things for Supper
XXI
The supper came every night. The knock came every night. Every night she unbolted the corridor door and stepped back into the dark, and every night he found his chair, and she found hers, and they sat across a table she could not see from a man she could not see, and she asked him things.
She had found out, by the second week, that she was spending her days moving towards those hours.
Mrs MacLeod answered what was necessary and very little more.
Angus spent most of his time about the estate.
Falstaff adored her and could not engage her mind.
By the time the knock came, she had usually been starved for conversation long enough that the sound of it went through her like relief.
She asked him everything she could think of.
She asked about the house — its history, its age, the hidden passages she had begun to map by touch.
He answered these without evasion and with what sounded like pleasure, or the closest she had yet heard from him.
He knew the house in the way of someone who had explored it carefully and recently, which added to the list.
She asked about Scotland. His knowledge of it was large in some respects and strikingly absent in others — the coastal geography, yes, the fishing industry, yes, the history of the land, yes; the local families, the village politics, the feuds that Mrs MacLeod mentioned in passing with a careful neutrality that kept her own views to herself — these he did not know and did not pretend to know, and she added that to the list.
She asked him once what he had read recently, naming a title she had found on the shelves without preface.
“I have not read that one,” he said.
“It was on the lower shelf,” she said. “The novels.”
“I know which shelf it is.”
“I thought perhaps you had read everything in the library.”
“Not quite,” he said. “Some of the novels I have not got to yet.”
Yet. He had been in this house since spring, and a man who read as he read would have made a considerable dent in those shelves by now — but yet was still a word that assumed a future here, with intentions that extended beyond the immediate. She weighed it and added it to what she was building.
It was not only the words he chose. A whisper carried no clear accent — she could not tell from the sound of his voice where he had been raised — but it carried everything else.
How he constructed a counter-argument. Which verb he reached for when the easier verb was closer to hand.
The cadence of his irony, very dry and very controlled, rooted in a tradition she had grown up inside because she had grown up in the English countryside listening to her father read aloud.
A Scottish gentleman — even one educated in England, even one who had spent years in London — would have kept something of the other country’s inflection.
This man had kept nothing of it. When he spoke, she heard the drawing rooms of England in every sentence; he had been formed entirely by one country and was performing belonging to another.
One night, she decided to test him on the matter. “Do you miss England?”
The silence before his answer was longer than the others. Not the silence of choosing careful words — the silence of being taken somewhere by the question before he could decide how much of where it had taken him to give back.
“Yes,” he said at last.
Flat. Unembroidered. Offered only because she had asked.
“What do you miss?”
He did not answer. She waited through enough silence to know he was not going to, and then she did not ask again. She heard him finish his supper. She heard him say goodnight. She heard the corridor door close behind him.
She lay awake afterward. Not thinking, precisely — the candle was out, and Falstaff was a warm, unreasonable weight across her feet, and the sea made its sounds through the stone — but not sleeping either.
She had come here braced to endure. To give whatever was required, hold her dignity, and not make it worse than it had to be.
She had been wrong about what would be required.
He had asked nothing. She kept waiting for the other thing, the thing she had prepared herself for, and it did not come.
The waiting for it had become its own strangeness.
She turned onto her back and looked towards the ceiling she could not see.
She was still waiting for the awful thing, for the monster to reveal himself.
Instead, she had found herself married to a man who listened, who answered, who left her room every night having asked nothing of her body and far too much of her mind.
She missed Jane. She missed her father. She missed being spoken to by someone who knew how to follow her thoughts where they ran quickest.
During the day, she could almost bear the house. At night, he made her remember everything she lacked.
The weeks began to take a shape. Morning gave her the headland, Falstaff, the road into Craighead, Mrs Fraser’s opinions, Mrs Garrow’s news, Reverend Innes’s calls, and Mr MacAulay’s packets of estate business.
She was, in all the ways anyone outside the house could see, the Baroness of Auchengray — present and visible and proper in her place, a woman making a life there.
She was not making a life there. Afternoon was the worst of it.
Mrs MacLeod had work and little inclination for society.
Angus was usually out. Falstaff slept. She read, and sometimes the reading helped; sometimes it only sharpened the sense that she was spending whole days in anticipation of the one conversation she was allowed in twenty-four hours.
By the fourth week, that knowledge had grown humiliatingly plain.
She found herself saving things for supper — some absurdity of Falstaff’s, a remark from Mrs Garrow, a question about the drainage papers — because there was no one else to tell.
If Mrs MacLeod came upon her in the library with reddened eyes, Elizabeth attributed it to her father or to the sea air and was not sure she lied.
By six o’clock, she was often so starved for engagement that she went into the dark half eager, half angry, and if she snapped now and then, it was because hunger and temper had become difficult to distinguish.
By the end of the fifth week, she had begun to understand the shape of what she could not get him to say.
He would tell her about the house, freely.
He would tell her about books, about the coast, about the weather, the tides, and the light off the sea.
He would ask her questions — about Falstaff, about her letters, about what she had seen on the headland that morning — with a genuine attention that still occasionally undid her when she was not braced for it.
He would answer questions about the practical arrangements of their situation without apparent discomfort.
He would, if she offered something small and personal, receive it with a care that made her want to offer something larger, which was itself a reason not to.
He would not tell her about himself.
Not what his history was, not where he was from, not why he had chosen this darkness for this life — she could not approach any of those edges without feeling the conversation solidify around him, his answers becoming more considered, the warmth draining out of them until she was talking to a man who was still present but had drawn a door across himself that she could not see.
On the evening of the fortieth day, she decided to find out what was behind it.
She had been working towards it all evening, approaching from different angles.
She asked about his family — parents, siblings — and he told her, without evasion but without detail, that he had a sister, that they were close, that he hoped to see her again when circumstances allowed — and he stopped there, and she did not follow it, and they moved on.
She asked about his education, framed as a question about a book. He answered with the polish of a thorough education he was trying not to place by letting her guess where it had been obtained, and had almost succeeded.
Now they were at the end of the supper, plates pushed back, and she had one question she had been carrying all evening.
“Do you know,” she asked, “what I find strangest about this?”
“There is a great deal that is strange about this,” he said. “You will have to be more exact.”
“Not the darkness,” she said. “Not the whisper. Not the marriage in the dark to a man I had never met — those things are strange, but they have explanations, or at least I have been given something that stands in the place of an explanation, and I have chosen not to challenge it for now. What I find strangest,” she said, “is that you already knew me.”
The whisper did not come. The fork clinked as if he were carrying on with his meal. But he had stopped chewing.
“Not what a solicitor might discover,” she added.
“Not the facts of my circumstances — that I was in reduced circumstances, that there were other arrangements in train. You knew what kind of woman I was. You knew I would want a library. You knew what kind of books I would want to find on its shelves. The morning after I arrived, I asked for a dog, and the next morning, a dog appeared, not a small decorative thing like most ladies would ask for, but a clueless brute of an impractical size, which is precisely what anyone who had ever heard me describe what I would want from a dog would have known to send. A solicitor does not assemble that picture.”
His feet had shifted under the table. His wine glass stilled on the cloth.
“So, I want to know — not more about you, because you have made it clear you will not tell me that, and I am not asking it. I am asking how you knew so much about me.”
His silences had become, over these weeks, the most legible thing about him. She waited through this one.
“I had you looked into,” he said at last.
“By the solicitor, yes.”
“By others.”
“What others?”
“People whose business it is to find out things.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “How long had you been looking?”
Nothing.
“Was it weeks? Months? Did you know about my father’s death before it happened?”
“No.” Immediate. She believed it because it made sense, but there was still something…
“After, then. How soon after?”
“Not long. But almost too long.”
“And you decided — on what basis does a man who has never met a woman decide she is the person he wants for this?”
This silence was different entirely. She heard him breathe. She heard the careful control of it. She heard the beginning of a sentence attempted and abandoned, and then another, and then nothing.
“You are not going to answer that.”
“I cannot answer that.”
“Cannot? Or will not?”
The dark gave nothing back.
“You sent someone to Meryton. Not a solicitor with a list of questions, because that sort of thing gets noticed and would have got back to me. Someone who can look inconspicuous. Someone who knew how to ask after me from the people who have known me since I was a child without raising suspicion — Mrs Long, who taught me the pianoforte when Mary gave up on me; the Gouldings, who had me to dinner with my father a hundred times; the vicar, who held me at my christening. The picture you were working from was not built in a week at a London desk. It was built out of many hours in a place you have never been. Had you?”
The silence that followed was the longest she had yet produced from him.
Then his boots scuffed the floor, and his chair rattled.
“Goodnight, Mrs Carlisle.”
She heard him cross to the corridor door. The door opened.
“George—”
The door closed.
She went over everything she had just said.
She was right. She knew she was right. She knew he knew she was right, and she knew the rightness of it had sent him out of the room.
The triumph of it, and the loss of it, and the strange ache of having pushed on something and felt it give — she held all of this in the dark until the candles went out one by one.
He stood in the passage with his hand still on the door.
George —
The syllable had been cut off by the closing of the door, but he had heard the beginning of it, the shape of his father’s name in her mouth, and the sound of it had moved through him the way the cold moved through the walls of this house — directly, comprehensively, without any concern for what lay in its path.
He had been four steps from the table when she began the word, and he had closed the door on her.
She had called him George. Not “Mr Carlisle,” the name on the proxy contract, the way his mother had called his father “Mr Darcy” until the day she died.
She had taken the name he had built for himself from his father’s Christian name and his mother’s family barony, and she had used it the way people used a name when they needed a person to call out to — across a room, across a closing door.
The intimacy of it from her mouth had not felt like the manufactured name he had given her.
It had felt, somehow, like the name he had hidden.
In the mural chamber, he sat at the table with the lamp unlit and looked at the dark.
The letter to Webb was half-finished and would stay that way tonight.
He had nothing useful left for Webb. He had nothing useful left for anyone.
He had closed a door in his wife’s face while she was saying a name she thought was his, and he was going to have to go back into that room tomorrow and be George Carlisle convincingly enough that the ground he had just lost could be recovered.
He was not certain how much ground there was left to lose.