Chapter 26 #3
Miles sat with this for a moment, which was one of the things about him—he could sit with something without immediately filling it, which most people could not, and which had made him useful over the years and was making him useful in a different way now.
He drank, set the glass down, and looked at the fire, which had been going down since Dominic arrived and which no one in this establishment appeared to feel any urgency about.
“You are a man who walked into Doctors’ Commons the morning after,” Miles said, without looking away from the fire.
“Before Lucien arrived. Before anyone asked you to. You obtained the license on your own initiative and you said nothing about it to anyone, including me, which means you did not do it for an audience.” He glanced over.
“That was not the action of a man who didn’t want to be married. ”
“That was the action of a man who did not want Lucien to have grounds—”
“No.” Miles’s voice was even. “I have known you for nine years. I know the difference between you acting from obligation and you acting from something else. That was something else.” He looked back at the fire. “You know it was.”
Dominic had no answer to that. He looked at the far corner, where the argument about the hand had reached some kind of impasse, and both men had resorted to staring at the table.
“I cannot promise her,” he said, after a time. “That is the whole of it. She wants things that require a man who can promise—who can put himself forward and say with confidence that he will not damage what he’s been given. I cannot do that. Not honestly.”
“Why not.”
“Because I have watched what damage looks like from the inside of it.” His jaw moved.
“I know what a man becomes when the loss—when the fear of it—gets to him. I have seen it very close.” He stopped.
“I am managing one child adequately on his best days. What gives me the right to take on more than that?”
“You are doing considerably better than adequately,” Miles said.
“That is—”
“Dominic.” Miles turned in his chair, both elbows on the table, which was not a position he generally adopted and which indicated that the pleasant register was entirely gone.
“Listen to me. I have watched you do something difficult every single day for four months with that boy. I have seen it from the outside. You do not always know what he needs, and you do not always say the right thing, and on more than one occasion you have made a mess of it and then gone back and done it differently. That is not a man incapable of being a father. That is a man learning how.” He held Dominic’s gaze.
“The only difference between now and then is that you chose to begin.”
“James came to me by circumstance. There was no one else—”
“You have told yourself that story for four months and I think you have told it long enough.”
Miles sat back. He was quiet for a moment, looking at his glass. Whatever he was weighing, he weighed it, and then he set it down.
“I am going to say something I have not said before, because I think it has arrived at the point where it needs to be said.” He turned his glass once on the table.
“Some men do not get what you have been handed. Not because of any failure of theirs—simply because it does not come. The right person, at the right moment, in a situation where something can actually be built.” He paused.
“I know this because I am one of those men.” He said it with no particular bid for sympathy, in the same even tone he used to discuss Wiltshire property.
“I go to my club. I go home to a house in Grosvenor Square that is very well run and very quiet. I have a fine horse and no one who will sit beside me in the dark and say something ordinary when I need it.” Miles looked at the table.
“You have that. It is in your house right now. And you are sitting here.”
Dominic looked at the wall.
“Fear is not prophecy,” Miles said. “I know you believe it is. I know you have built a very airtight case for why you should not be trusted with anything you care about, and I have no doubt the case is coherent. But it is serving the sitting, not the marriage. And I am out of ways to say that pleasantly.” He stood up.
He replaced his hat. “Go home, Dominic.”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know.” He put the price of his glass on the table. “Whatever you need to say that you have not said yet.” He looked at him once more, direct and brief. “I will be at White’s at nine if you require somewhere to be that isn’t this.”
And with that, Miles went out. The door opened, drew in a stripe of grey evening air, and swung closed.
Dominic sat in the room with the dying fire and the card players who had resolved their argument and moved to a third hand and showed no sign of stopping.
He was too tired to explain to Miles why it couldn’t just be as easy as saying whatever he needed to say.
Was it really that simple? He had been blunt with her, had he not?
He could not have a child. He had not wanted one, he…
Yet, he found that he could not set his friend’s words aside.
He put on his coat, paid his account, and went out into the evening.