XXX #2
She had been none of those things. She had been wanting — inconvenient, unmistakable, entirely driven by instinct. She had wanted not merely the act but the nearness in it, the terrible sweetness of being gathered up and answered. She had acted on it.
Worse, she had acted on it blind. She had yielded herself to a man she could not describe, could not have picked out of a crowd if daylight and Providence had conspired together. Now, all that reaching after closeness looked, in retrospect, perilously like humiliation.
What sort of woman seduces a man?
She pressed her fingers over her mouth and breathed.
She was not going to cry. Crying would require her to name the thing exactly. She was not ready to name it. She knew what it was. She had known it for some weeks, and she was choosing not to say it, because once she did, she could not unsay it.
Falstaff exhaled magnificently and set his paw over her foot.
She sat up until the cold was genuinely unreasonable, and then she pulled the blankets over herself. She lay in the dark and listened to the sea and did not cry, for all the reasons she could not say aloud.
On the third night, he lay in the dark and thought about the room below him.
What was she doing, alone in it for a third evening?
He had come to her every night for nearly three months.
He had built something in those evenings — he had no name for what it was, only the knowledge that it was real, that it mattered, that three nights of silence from the only other person in this house would tell her something that was not the truth.
He was her husband. The marriage was legal. What had occurred on Thursday was within the bounds of a lawful union. She had said yes and meant it. There had been no wrong in fact.
She did not know why he had gone quiet. She could not know that he had broken a vow he had made to himself, or what the vow had meant to him, or what breaking it said about the state of him.
She had what he had done on Thursday, the way he had taken and gloried in her, and then three closed doors.
Whatever she was making of that, alone in the dark, was something he had caused.
And what, exactly, had he left her with in his absence?
A large house by the sea, winter closing in, distant neighbours she could like but never wholly belong to, and a husband who had taught her to expect companionship in whispers and then withdrawn it without explanation.
He had narrowed her world with his own hands and then meant to congratulate himself for leaving her to bear it bravely.
She was not made for a life of polite fragments.
She required conversation, warmth, the quick answering spark of another mind, and he knew it because he had seen her diminish without it and revive the instant he gave her even this maimed version of a marriage.
Whispered talk across a supper table and the intimacy of a dark bed were pitiful offerings beside what she ought to have had, but they were the only offerings in his power.
He could tell himself that going back to her was kindness. He could even make a shape of duty around it.
He wanted her company with a selfishness so immediate he could nearly pass it off, even to himself, as concern for her.
He wanted the room below him because it held the one place in the world where he was no longer required to be alone.
He had believed these three nights were a form of penance.
Sitting in the mural chamber with his guilt, keeping himself from her, not asking any more of her than he had already taken.
It had been discipline, or had told itself it was.
In the dark of the third night, it was what it was — one hiding from a reckoning behind the pretence of honour, while the woman below him sat alone and paid for it.
He got up. He put on his coat. He walked the passage and stopped at her door.
He knocked.
Her footsteps — a dozen or more, which meant she had not been waiting at the table. She had given up. Gone to bed.
The door opened.
“Can you bear my company?” The whisper came out smaller than he intended.
“What I cannot bear is another night alone.” She stepped back.
He came in and found his chair in the dark. She found hers. The supper was cold, but still laid as it always was. He had not expected that — had thought the three evenings might have changed the arrangement — and the ordinariness of it was its own thing to bear.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
“You do not.”
“Elizabeth—”
“If this is a legal marriage, and you have sworn to me that it is, then neither of us committed a wrong. I will not receive an apology for something that was not a wrong.”
“I cannot hold that to be entirely true,” he said.
“Which part is false?”
His throat strangled on the words he could not say.
“The legal part stands,” she said. “You said so plainly, and you do not say things you do not mean. I know that much about you.”
“I had sworn to myself,” he said, “that I would not. Not until I could offer you more than this. I broke it on Thursday.”
“You said that before. I was present, if you recall.”
Not the wit. He could not bear the wit now.
He closed his eyes and started over. “I have been sitting upstairs, considering Thursday and the three days since, and I find… the three days are the worse wrong. I abandoned you. That is what it was, and I will call it by its name. I was — I was ashamed, and I left rather than face you, and I am sorrier for that than for anything that came before it.”
He heard her fumbling with her hands. “Are you sorry for… all of it?”
“Good Lord, no.” The reply breathed out of him before his better sense could catch it. “Elizabeth, I… I think it was the most magnificent hour of my life, but I—”
“You are here now,” she interrupted.
“I am here.”
“Then stay.”
He stayed.
He had eaten little since Thursday. Tonight he was hungry, which had not seemed possible an hour ago, and he made himself begin. Even with talk so small the substance would be forgot by morning, but he could carry the sound of her voice with him after the fracture.
“The factor sent word this morning about the east field drainage,” he said. “I have given Angus instructions for the spring.”
“Good.”
The word was small and arrived alone. He had been ready to give her the rest of it — the figures, the question of which tenant would lose the wet acreage, the calculation he had been turning since dawn. She did not ask.
“The weather has been clearer these last days. I heard the headland was—”
“Yes,” she said. “It has been.”
He was aware, in a way he had not been in months, of the effort the ordinary evenings had required — the performance of George Carlisle across a table, present and giving nothing away. Tonight, he could not find the man. He had left him somewhere in the passage.
He wanted to tell her she had nothing to be ashamed of. He thought a long time and could not find a way to say it without naming what he was referring to, which would require her to name it too. He was not going to ask that of her.
“I owe you an answer,” he said. “From Thursday. What you asked me, at the end.”
“I… I am sorry… what?”
“You asked what kind of music.”
“Oh.” She stopped. “I had forgotten. So much else has—” She stopped. “You did not answer.”
“No.” He turned his glass on the table. “I grew up with a great deal of it. A house where it was constant. My sister plays.” It was an effort to say it; he heard the small admission of it in his own voice and could not call it back.
“She is still playing. I am the one who is not there to hear it. And there were other evenings. Other rooms. A pianoforte played with a great deal of feeling and rather less attention to the keys.”
A small silence. He had given her something — more than he had meant to, more than was prudent — and she had heard it.
“Badly played,” she said, after a moment, lightly.
He could have wept at the lightness. “Her own assessment, not mine.”
“And what did she play, this enthusiast of yours?”
“Whatever she chose. She had strong opinions about what ought to be played and was not shy about them.”
“I approve of her already.” Elizabeth set down her glass. “Will you tell me her name?”
“I think not. Tell me about the Handel.”
“You will not get me to be the only one talking, Mr Carlisle.”
“I am sorry. It was a poor evasion.”
“Honest, at least.”
She was herself again, her cleverness and humour pushing through the cracks, without resentment, without any of the questions she would have been entitled to. He did not know how he had earned that, and he was not willing to ask. He took a swallow of his wine to cover that he could not speak.
“I told you on Thursday that I used to play Handel rather haphazardly,” she said, after a moment.
“Haphazard was not the word you used, but perhaps the intent.”
“I did dabble with certain Italian composers. My father preferred them, which I always suspected was less about the music and more about his feelings regarding the French. I had views about Handel that my sister found exhausting. She said I played him as though I were trying to win an argument.”
“Were you?”
“Almost certainly.” She set her glass down. “I miss it considerably more than I told you on Thursday.”
“I know,” he said.
“How do you know?”
He had walked into that one, too. “You said so,” he said. “On Thursday.”
“I said I missed it. I did not say considerably more.”
He had no answer for that. She did not pursue it. She picked up her fork. The evening became something that was not what it had been before Thursday.
It was not nothing.