EPILOGUE #2
I have not played, it went on, and she felt her shoulders come down a half inch the way they always did at that line, which he put now in every letter, near the top, because he knew she looked for it and had stopped pretending either of them did not.
I will not tell you it is easy, because you would know it for a falsehood and think less of me for the attempt.
There was a faro bank set up in the mess at Michaelmas and I sat at the far end of the room with my back to it and wrote you a letter about apples I had not yet been sent, only to have somewhere to put my hands.
I am sending you that letter too, the apple one, so that you may see the shape a bad night takes for me now, which is a foolish letter about fruit instead of a marker I cannot cover.
It is not a cure. The major says there is no cure for what I have, only a long succession of nights got through, and that the trick of it is to make the getting-through into a habit before the wanting can make itself one.
I am trying to make it a habit. Some nights the habit wins.
I am writing to tell you, on the nights it wins, because you once told me I might be a person to you and not a creditor, and a person tells his sister when the habit wins.
She carried that one up to Theodore entire, every word of it, because there was nothing in it she needed to keep back, and because he had earned, by a year of asking nothing about her brother, the right to be told the good of him freely now that there was good to tell.
He read it standing at the window of his study, and when he had finished he folded it along its own creases, carefully, the way he folded things, and handed it back to her, and did not say anything clever, and did not say anything at all for a moment.
“He is not cured,” Theodore said at last. “He told you so himself, which is the most hopeful sentence in the letter, because a man who is lying to himself promises a cure, and a man who means to do the work describes the work. He has described the work.” He looked out at the ridge.
“I bought him a door, and you offered it to him, and he has walked through it and is standing, this morning, on the far side of it with his back to a faro bank, writing his sister a letter about apples. That is not nothing, Ellen. I spent a great deal of my life believing that the only safe thing was to need no one and be needed by no one, and I will tell you what a year of you has taught me, which is that the apple letter is the whole of what a family is for. It is somewhere to put your hands on the bad night that is not the thing that will destroy you.”
“You have grown alarmingly fond of metaphors, for a man who told me eighteen months ago that he was not fond of Cowper.”
“I have a great deal of feeling banked up from thirty-five years of spending none of it. You will have to bear the interest. It comes due at inconvenient moments and frequently in front of the staff.” But he said it with the small private turn at the corner of his mouth that was as near as he came, even now, even to her, to a grin, and she counted it, the way she counted the steadiness of Henry’s hand, as a thing got by long stubborn refusal to settle for the cold version.
Augusta arrived for her customary fortnight at the end of the month and stayed, as she always threatened to and always did, considerably longer.
“She is too thin,” Augusta announced, of the eleven-week-old, on the first evening, having held her for an hour and surrendered her to the nurse with visible reluctance.
“All this family is born too thin and spends the rest of its life alarming people who like a child with some upholstery to it. You were too thin. Theodore was a positive reproach. I shall have Cook make the things that put weight on a nursing mother, and you will eat them, Ellen, and not move them about your plate in the way you think I have never noticed, because I have noticed it across this table for a year and held my tongue on account of the wedding and then the sickness and then the lying-in, and the holding is now officially at an end.”
“I have eaten everything put in front of me for a year, my lady.”
“You have eaten everything put in front of you since the morning you threw me out of your bedroom and discovered you would rather be furious than lifeless, which I have always counted the best afternoon’s work of my life, and I shall go to my grave taking the credit for it whether you grant it me or not.
” Augusta arranged her shawl with enormous satisfaction. “You named the child Sophia.”
“We did.”
“Theodore’s mother rode that ridge with her hair coming down and laughed at things a duchess is not supposed to find funny, and the whole county thought her fast, and she was the happiest woman I ever knew, and they put her in the ground at four-and-forty and this family spent eleven years afterward behaving as though happiness had been the thing that had taken her life.
” Augusta’s voice did not waver, but her hands, folded in her lap, were not quite still.
“I have waited eleven years to hear that name said in a warm room again. You have given an old woman a great many things this year, Ellen, most of which you did by accident in the course of saving yourself, which is the only honest way anyone ever helps anyone. But you gave me that one on purpose, and I have noticed, and I am too old to pretend I have not.”
“You are not so old as you make out, my lady. You manage three counties’ worth of drawing rooms from a card table and you ran a campaign against an earl that he is still abroad recovering from.”
“I am exactly as old as I make out and a good deal older when it suits me, and the campaign was the most entertainment I have had since the Regency, and if Greaves had been a cleverer man it would have been over too quickly to enjoy.” She held out her arms. “Give me the child back. The nurse has had her quite long enough and is making sheep’s eyes at the under-gardener through the window besides, which I shall mention to Selby, who will deal with it in the way Selby deals with things, which is to say it will simply have stopped by Tuesday and no one will ever know how. ”
In the evenings now Theodore read aloud.