Chapter 31 #2
She thought about Thomas. She thought about what she had said on the stairs, and what he had said, and the look on his face when she had said it, open in a way she had not seen him open before, undisguised in a way that had been almost difficult to look at directly because it was so different from what she had grown accustomed to.
I will come, he had said. When you are ready. I will come.
She was not ready yet. But the not-readiness felt different now.
Not the dull, managed not-readiness of the past weeks, the composure that cost everything to maintain.
This was lighter. She had set down the heaviest thing, Clarissa, the long habit of her, the stubborn defending of someone who had never required defending in the way Genevieve had done it, and the lightness of the absence was going to take some getting used to.
She was getting used to it. She thought she would be ready soon.
Perhaps even the next day.
Chapter 32
The study was dark except for the fire and the lamp on the desk, which Thomas had lit and then ignored. He had come to find in the days since Genevieve left that his study was his preferred place to be when the sun went down.
He had lit the lamp with some vague intention of doing something.
Reading, perhaps, or attending to correspondence, or any of the various occupations a man might reasonably pursue in his own study on an ordinary evening.
He had then sat down and looked at the lamp and understood that it was not going to be an ordinary evening.
The correspondence was not going to be attended to.
Reading was not a thing he was currently capable of because reading required a quality of attention that he did not have access to at present.
All of it having been redirected toward a single subject that was not the sort of subject one could usefully think about for five consecutive hours and yet there he was, five hours in, with no sign of improvement.
The decanter was within reach. He had been making use of that fact.
The fire needed tending. He was aware of it and had been aware of it for some time without doing anything about it, which was, he thought, fairly representative of the past several months of his life.
Things requiring his attention, him being aware of them, him doing nothing, the situation worsening accordingly. He was beginning to identify a pattern.
He had sent a letter that afternoon. Three attempts, each abandoned, before he had arrived at something that was less a letter than a collection of sentences arranged in approximately the right order, informing Genevieve that he hoped she was well and that he was available to speak whenever she felt ready and that he remained…
and here he had crossed out four different words before settling on yours, which was both true and insufficient and the best he had managed.
He had sent it before he could revise it into something worse. He did not know whether it had reached her. He did not know what she had done with it if it had.
He heard the door.
He looked up. Samuel was in the doorway, still in his coat, with the expression of a man who has assessed a situation from the threshold and is not surprised by what he has found.
"Your grandmother let me in," Samuel said.
"She lets everyone in. It's her primary failing."
"She seemed to think you needed company.
" He came in without waiting for an invitation, which Thomas had long ago accepted was simply how Samuel operated.
It was a quality that had irritated him considerably when they first met, some twelve years ago, and which he had eventually concluded was preferable to the alternative, which were people who waited to be invited and therefore never arrived when they were actually needed.
Samuel settled into the chair across from the desk with the ease of someone who had been in that room many times before. He looked at the decanter. He looked at Thomas. He looked at the fire, which had burned considerably lower than fires were generally permitted to burn in inhabited rooms.
"How long have you been at that?"
"Since four."
"It's nine."
"Yes." Thomas refilled his glass. He was aware it was not improving the impression he was making and found he could not summon the energy to care about impressions this evening. "Would you like some?"
"Evidently." Samuel held out a glass with the composure of a man making the best of a situation he has walked into voluntarily. "You look terrible, incidentally."
"You enjoy telling me so."
"I am consistent." Samuel settled back. "The gossip has reached the club."
Thomas looked at him.
"That Genevieve has left." Samuel said it plainly, as he said most things. "It's in fairly wide circulation. I heard it from three separate people before I had been there an hour."
"Mercy." Thomas set his glass down. "Already."
"I am afraid so." Samuel looked at the fire. "Clarissa, I assume."
"Almost certainly."
"You do not sound surprised."
"I am not." Thomas was quiet for a moment.
"I have been wrong about her for a very long time.
I managed, through considerable effort and a great deal of willful self-deception, to avoid admitting that until it became impossible not to.
" He picked up the glass again. "She was never what I thought she was.
I constructed a version of her and called it love and spent weeks after she left mourning something that had not actually existed. "
He stopped. "Genevieve saw it. From the beginning. She tried to tell me, in her way. Not directly, she was too careful with me to be direct about it. If I had been willing to see it… I was not willing. I was too attached to my own version of events to let anyone else's version touch it."
Samuel said nothing. He was very good at nothing when nothing was what the situation required.
"She was right about everything," Thomas said.
"That's the conclusion I keep arriving at, and I keep arriving at it from different directions, and it keeps being the same conclusion.
Every assessment she made was correct. Everything she understood about Clarissa, about the situation, about what I was doing and why, correct.
And I gave her absolutely no reason to believe I saw it, no reason to believe I was paying the right kind of attention, and she walked around this house for weeks performing composure that must have cost her an enormous amount, and I—" He stopped.
"I watched her do it. I was concerned about it.
I did not do anything useful about it." He looked at the fire.
"She told me she was in love with me. On the stairs. While she was leaving."
Samuel looked at him.
"And then she left," Thomas said.
"What are you going to do about it?"
"I do not know." He said it with the flatness of a man who has been sitting with the same question for five hours and has made no progress and knows it. "She asked me not to follow immediately. I told her I would come when she was ready. And then—"
He gestured at the decanter with the slightly resigned air of a man acknowledging a decision he had made and was not proud of. "She said she needed somewhere quiet to think. She said she needed time. And I have been—" He stopped. "I have been giving her time."
"Have you?" Samuel's tone was perfectly neutral.
"Yes."
"For five days."
"She asked."
"She asked you not to follow her in the immediate aftermath of a significant shock," Samuel said.
"She did not ask you to disappear into your study and communicate via letter and spend the intervening period in the company of a decanter.
" He turned his own glass slowly. "Those are different requests, Thomas. "
Thomas looked at him.
"She needs space."
"She needs to know that she matters enough for you to come and tell her so in person." Samuel met his eyes, and there was something in his gaze that was direct in a way he did not always permit himself to be direct. "Those are also different things."
The fire shifted. A log settled, sending up a small shower of sparks that illuminated briefly and then went dark.
Thomas looked at it and thought about the letter he had sent that afternoon, the four crossed-out words before yours, the whole insufficient business of it, and understood with a clarity he had been avoiding that Samuel was right in exactly the way he was right about everything he bothered to have an opinion on.
"The gossip," Thomas said. "She will have to know about the gossip."
"Yes."
"Someone should tell her."
"Yes." Samuel looked at him steadily. "I was thinking of calling on her, actually."
Thomas looked up.
"At her parents'." Samuel's tone had returned to its customary mildness, the quality of a man saying something entirely reasonable.
"To tell her about the gossip. She ought to know what's being said, and someone should tell her, and since you have apparently decided that the appropriate response to loving your wife is to sit in the dark until she sends for you—"
"You are not going to visit my wife."
"She would appreciate a friendly face, I think.
" Samuel was looking at the fire with an expression of tranquil consideration.
"She has always found it easy to talk to me.
We have a correspondence. I have let it lapse, which I do not think was particularly kind of me, but I could combine the visit with writing in person, which is more—"
"Samuel."
"…considerate than a letter, I have always thought. More personal. And she has been having a difficult time, which—"
"I swear to you…"