Chapter Ten
“Lord Theodore asked me this morning why his father hates him.”
Nathaniel had been reading the same line of a drainage report for some minutes when she said it, and he went on holding the paper as though it still required him, because setting it down would have meant finding something for his hands to do, and his hands had gone unreliable.
“He did not say it to wound you,” Elinor went on, from the doorway she had not come through.
“He said it the way he reports the dimensions of the Colosseum. As a fact he has established and filed. He was drawing a map at the time and he did not look up. He said, Miss Wrenfield, my father hates me, and I should like to know the reason, so that I may stop doing whatever it is. And then he asked me to pass the green pencil.”
“How long has he believed it?”
“I do not know. Long enough that it has stopped being a wound and become a fact, which is worse. A wound a child shows you. A fact he keeps to himself and works around.” She did not soften it.
“He has built the whole of his conduct around managing a father who hates him, Your Grace. The locked doors, the driven-off tutors, the hands held behind his back. It was never wickedness in him. It was a small person doing his level best to live beside a thing he believed about himself and could not alter.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I did not believe it was true, and that the reason was not his to carry, and that I would not invent one to comfort him because invented comforts come apart in a child’s hands and cut them.
Then I told him the truth I was sure of, which is that you do not hate him.
” She paused. “And then I came down here, because the rest of the truth is not mine to give him, and I will not let him grow up inside a lie I could have prevented by walking down one flight of stairs.”
He set the report down at last. It had stopped being a thing he could pretend to read.
“I do not hate him.” He heard how inadequate it was the moment it was out.
“I know you do not. He is the one who requires telling, not me.” She came no further into the room.
“But I think there is a reason you have let him believe it, Your Grace, and I think you know what it is. You have not said it aloud to a living soul in seven years, and I think it is going to have to be said now, today, to someone, before you can say the small clean part of it to him. You may say it to me. I am very practised at being told things and keeping them. It is nearly the whole of my profession.”
The room was quiet.
“He has her face.” It came out of him sideways, the way a thing comes when the front door of it is too narrow.
“Honoria’s. Not a little. Not a likeness one has to be told to see.
He has her exact face, the eyes most of all, and he turns them on me across a breakfast table, and suddenly I am not at a breakfast table, Miss Wrenfield.
I am in a sickroom seven years ago, and there is a great deal I did not do in it, and the boy’s face hands the whole of it back to me before he has finished asking for the marmalade.
It is worst in the mornings. The light is hers in the mornings.
He looks up from his egg wearing her exact expectation of being delighted by the day, and I must either leave the room or speak to him as I would a junior clerk, and that he remembers too, and sets against me. ”
“How did she die?”
“A fever, the autumn after he was born. It took its time about it. Weeks. The physicians came from London, I paid them, ordered more of them and had the best of everything brought, because that is the thing I know how to do. I find the practical shape of a trouble, and I throw money and method at it until it yields.” His voice did the careful, level thing and he let it, because the alternative was worse.
“She did not want the physicians. She wanted me to sit down. She said so. She said, Nathaniel, the physicians have done all they can do. I would like you to sit down, hold my hand and tell me about Italy, the way you used to before you decided sophistication required you to be bored by everything. And I could not.”
“You could not sit down?”
“I could not be tender. I did not have it. I had spent four-and-twenty years being trained out of it by men who called it weakness, and a Grand Tour performing a boredom I did not feel. I stood in that room with my dying wife asking me for the one thing, and I gave her a physician from Harley Street instead, because a physician was a thing I could procure and tenderness was not.”
“And you told yourself it was the greater love. The fourth opinion. The best of everything.”
“I told myself I was doing more than any man could be asked to do. I have a great gift for telling myself things. It is the family talent.”
“Did you sit with her at all? At the end.”
“At the very end. When there was nothing left to procure and no opinion left to send for, I ran out of things to do, and a man who has run out of things to do must either leave the room or sit down in it. So, I sat down. Too late to be of use, in time to watch.” His voice held its level by force.
“I held her hand for the last hour of her life, and it was the only hour of her whole illness in which I gave her the thing she had asked for, and she was by then past knowing whether I gave it or withheld it. So, you see I cannot even claim I never sat down. I sat down. I merely waited until it could no longer matter, which is, I have come to think, the truest portrait of me that exists.”
“It is the truest portrait of the man you were at seven-and-twenty, who is dead, Your Grace, as surely as she is. I have not met him. I have met the man you are at four-and-thirty, who cooks rice for an hour to make a woman weep at a table, and sits on a bed he has never once sat on, and builds locks to hand to frightened children. That man sits down in time. You have only failed to notice, because you persist in measuring him against a corpse, and a corpse will win that comparison every time, for the dead do not have to keep proving they have changed.”
“She died asking me to sit down. I was standing by the window arranging for a fourth opinion. I have been standing by windows ever since. You may have noticed,” he added.
Elinor did not say she was sorry. She did not say Honoria had known he loved her, or that he had done his best, or any of the soft useless things the world keeps in its pockets for exactly this.
He had braced for them, but they did not come, and that was the first thing in seven years that had felt like air.
“What was she like?” Elinor said. “Honoria. Not the dying of her. The woman.”
He was some time finding it, a door long painted shut.
“Quick. Quicker than I was, and kind about it, which I was not. She laughed at the Tour. She said I had crossed the whole of Europe and come home with a list. She was the only soul who ever told me to my face that I was absurd, and she was right, and I married her for the telling and then spent four years too proud to be improved by it.” A breath that cost him.
“She would have liked you. That is a useless thing to say, but I find I want to say it regardless. She would have liked you enormously, and the pair of you would have made my life a misery and a great deal better than it was.”
“And the boy grew into her face,” she said.
“The boy grew into her face. And I told myself it was kinder to keep my distance, that he was better with nurses, tutors and anyone who could look at him without flinching. I have also let him believe his father is cold when the truth is that his father is a coward who cannot bear to be reminded, daily, in miniature, of the single worst thing he ever failed to do.” He pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes and took it away.
“So. You wished to know why I let a child believe I hate him. Now you know. It is not a reason that does me any credit, and I would be obliged if you did not pretend it does.”
“I have no intention of pretending anything,” Elinor said.
“It does you no credit at all. You failed a dying woman who asked you for the one thing you could not buy, and you have spent seven years failing her living son in penance for it. It is not penance, Your Grace, it is the same failure wearing a longer coat. You are doing it again. You are standing at the window away from him.”
It should have been unbearable. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to him since the sickroom, because it was true, and because she had not flinched from the truth to spare him.
The not-flinching was the very tenderness Honoria had asked for, and he had not been able to give.
He was now, too late for her, learning to recognise it when it was done to him.
“You make it sound a thing a man can simply set down.”
“I make it sound a thing you set down one breakfast at a time, which is the only way anyone has ever set anything down. You will not undo seven years tonight, and you must not attempt it, for a man who tries to undo all of it in an evening frightens a child worse than the silence ever did. You will look at his face tomorrow, and it will still be her face. You will say good morning to the boy and not to the sickroom, and the morning after you will do it again, and one day, a long way from here, you will look up and see only Theo. That is the work, Your Grace. It is dull, and it is daily, and no physician in Harley Street sells it. It is the one trouble you cannot procure your way out of, and the only one that was ever worth its weight in your plain attention.”
“Then tell me what to do,” he said. “I do not know how to speak to him. I have a sentence in me, and I do not know how to make it small enough.”