Chapter Twenty-One
“Read me the next line, Theo. You have been glaring at the same one for the length of a small war, and the line has not blinked, so I think you must.”
“I stopped missing Mama. I stopped when you came.”
He said it to the ledger, not to her, in the flat little voice children use for the things they have carried a long way. His whole face came apart at once, the way a thing comes apart that has been held together only by not being looked at.
“I did not mean it. I take it back. You cannot have heard it.”
“I heard it.” She put the pen down. “Theo, look at me. You have not done a wicked thing. Whatever your mind is telling you, it is lying.”
“I never even had her, which is the part that makes it worse, that I have lost a person I never once got to hold. Other boys forget a mother they remember. I am losing the only piece of mine I was ever given, which was missing of her, and I kept the missing very carefully because it was the whole of what there was. Now it has gone soft and warm, and it has your face in the middle of it, and a boy does not give his mother’s place away to the governess without asking anyone.
I have done it, and I cannot undo it, and you are not even cross.
You are looking at me kindly but you ought to send me to bed without anything. ”
He had made his confession like a much older person, in one breath, the clauses lined up as he lined up his sums, because he had built the whole indictment in private over a great many nights and was now reading out the verdict.
There was a smear of ink on his cheek from the afternoon.
It was the most undefended she had ever seen him, the orangery included, and she put down everything in her hands to attend to it properly.
“Come here.”
He did not come. He had got himself into the corner of the schoolroom where the map cloth hung, the one she had embroidered him the rivers on, and he had put his back to it as though he meant to defend it.
His chin was doing the terrible work a child’s chin did when it had decided that crying would be a further crime.
“I shall come there, then.” She went and sat on the floor beside him, in her good grey wool, on the boards, which a duchess was not supposed to do and which she had stopped consulting anyone about.
“Now. You are going to listen to a thing, and you are not going to argue with it, because I taught you your rivers and I am right about almost everything, you have said so yourself, twice.”
“Once.”
“Twice. You forgot the second time, which rather proves my point, so attend. You never knew her, Theo. You were a baby in your cradle when she went, far too small to keep a single picture of her, and that is the particular cruelty of your grief, that you were handed the hole and never once handed the person. What you have ached at all these years was never her face. You had no face of hers to ache at. It was the shape of her you missed, the place where a mother stands, and that place has been cold and empty in you your whole life. You have guarded it the way you guard everything. Now it is filling, and you have decided the filling is a robbery. It is not a robbery. It is the place doing the one thing a place is for.”
“But it was hers. The place. And I am giving it to you.”
“It is not one place with a single chair in it, where if I sit she must stand in the cold. That is the worst sum anyone ever taught you, and I do not know who to be cross at.” She tipped her head back against the cloth beside his.
“Love is not a room with only one chair. There is no fixed number of them. You do not owe her an empty seat kept cold forever to prove you would have loved her if you had been let. You have simply had more chairs built, which is what a heart does when it is working properly. It builds. It does not turn people out into the cold to make the room. The day you let me into that place will not be a day she leaves it. It will only be a day with more love in the house than there was the morning before.”
He was quiet for a while, working it over with his whole forehead, the way he worked a hard line of Latin.
“Are they real chairs? In the heart? Or is it only a way of talking, like when you say my Latin is coming along when it is not?”
“It is a way of talking. But it is the truest way I have, and your Latin is coming along, and I do not say things I do not mean, which you will discover in time is the chief inconvenience of me.”
“You will not tell my father I stopped. You will not say I stopped missing her.”
“You have not stopped. The ache has only changed its coat. And no, I would not. But I do not think your mother is the one you most want to tell, Theo, since you never met her to confess to. I think it is your father. And I think you have been frightened to, because you suspect he keeps the same bad sum in his own head that you keep in yours. You think that if you tell him that the cold place is warming, he will decide you have done a wicked thing too.” She got herself up off the floor, which was less graceful than the sitting down had been.
“Shall we go and find out whether he does?”
She had taken him into the small room off the library, the cold one nobody used, and shut the door on the boy, who waited in the passage with the patience of a child who knows the grown people are deciding something about him and has wisely declined to watch them do it.
Nathaniel had gone to the window and stood with his back to her, which she had learned by now to read as the posture of a man bracing.
“He should not be healing,” he said. “That is the thing you have come to tell me, that my son is mending, and you have said it as though it were good news.”
“It is the best news this house has had in years. Why are you grey?”
“Because I have spent almost eight years keeping her alive in the only place she had left to be alive in, which is the grieving, and now the boy is letting her go, gently, the way you tell him he may. You are right to tell him so, and the moment he sets his down there will be only mine left holding her up, and the day I set mine down she is gone. Truly gone. Not in a churchyard. Gone out of the world entirely, because the last two people who carry her will have chosen to be happy instead, and chosen it on purpose, with our eyes open. Tell me what that is, if it is not the pair of us agreeing to forget a woman because forgetting is more comfortable than the alternative.”
“It is grief, Nathaniel. You have made grief into a job. You have been turning up to it every morning since she died like a man minding a lamp, terrified that if you sleep it goes out. It has worn you to the bone, and it has frightened your son into believing that being happy is a theft.”
“I do not know how to stop. That is the truth of it, said plainly, which you are forever telling me I never do. I have been afraid of her the way Theo is afraid of her, only longer, and with more cause, because I was in the room when she went, and he was an infant down the corridor. You cannot prescribe me out of all those years in an afternoon, however right you are, and you are almost always right, which I have begun to find restful and ought to find alarming. And what would you have me do instead? Tell me. You are very full of what the heart builds and the place that warms. What does a man do with a dead wife he has not the talent to stop loving, and no wish to?”
“He moves her,” Elinor said it gently, and it was tender, and she would not be rough with it.
“Out of the grieving, which is a dark place and no fit room to keep a person you loved. You have her shut in the worst chamber in the house, the way you had the map room shut, and you go to her there in the dark and call it loyalty.”
“It is loyalty.”
“It is a haunting, Nathaniel, and you are the one being haunted, and the cruelty of it is that you built the haunted room yourself and turned the key and have been frightening your own son past it for years. Move her into the light. Speak of her in the daytime. Give Theo a true thing about her that is not sad, one he can keep in a pocket and take out whenever he likes, because the boy has nothing of her at all, not one picture, not one afternoon, only the cold space and the things he was told. The dead do not stay alive in our pain. They stay alive in being spoken of easily, by people who are not afraid of them. You have made his mother into a person he is afraid of. You did not mean to. But you have.”
He took a long time answering, but when he did, it was not an answer.
“There is a portrait. I had it taken down the week after the funeral, and it is in the room above this one, against the wall, with a cloth over it, and I have not looked at it in eight years, because the painter caught her exactly, and I could not be in a room with her face and go on functioning. Theo was a few months old when it came down. He has never once seen his mother’s face. ”
“Then I think,” she said, “it is time the cloth came off something in this house that is not a map.”
***
The room above the library was cold and disused.
Theo went into it the way one goes into deep water, by stages, holding her hand.
The portrait leaned against the far wall under its shroud, tall as a door.
Nathaniel stood before it a long moment and did not put his hand to the cloth, and she did not hurry him, because some keys take a man a year to turn and this one had taken eight.
Then he took the cloth off himself, in one motion, the way a man pulls a splinter, all at once being kinder than slowly. The dust came off with it and hung in the cold light from the one uncovered window.
The woman in the frame was fair, slight and grave, with Theo’s exact eyes, painted half-turned, as though she had been asked to hold still and had agreed only provisionally and meant to go back to her book the instant the man with the brush looked elsewhere.
Theo did not speak. His hand had found Elinor’s somewhere in the climb and was holding it the way a person holds a rail on a stair whose bottom he cannot see.
He was looking at the first picture of his mother he had ever been shown.
“That is her? That is what she looked like?”
“That is your mother,” Nathaniel said. “Honoria. She hated sitting for this. She is half-turned because she was cross at the painter for taking so long, and she told him so, every day for a week, very politely, which was the only way she was ever cross at anyone. She was polite at people until they surrendered. It was a remarkable weapon, and I never once saw it fail.”
“She looks like she is about to say something.”
“She is about to say the sitting has gone on quite long enough, thank you, and might we all have some tea. She said that a great deal. She held that almost nothing was so bad it could not be paused for tea, and she was usually right.”
“Tell me a thing she did. A real one, not a sad one.” Theo’s voice wobbled on the word and held. “I have only the sad ones, and they are not even mine. They are just what I was told. I want a different kind.”
“She fed a hedgehog one autumn and named it after the bishop, because they shared an expression and an opinion of everyone, and she would not be told it was disrespectful.” Nathaniel crouched to the boy’s height, before the portrait, with nothing between the three of them and the fair grave woman who looked about to ring for tea.
“She laughed like something coming undone. She was frightened of geese and not of horses, which is the wrong way about, and she knew it, and did not care. The day you were born, she held you, and she informed the midwife that you were plainly going to be the cleverest person in England, on no evidence, one hour into your life. There. Those are yours now. Put them in your pocket. They do not come out of any room when you take them, and they use up no chairs, because Miss Wrenfield is right about the chairs. She is right about most things. It is one of the trials of being married to her.”
“Did she know me? At all?”
“You were very new. She had you a few days, no more, and it was nowhere near long enough.” His voice held through all of it.
“She did not get to learn you, Theo, and that was the robbery of her whole life and not yours alone. But she wanted you past all sense, and she would have liked Miss Wrenfield enormously. The two of them would have worked together against me inside a week. I have made my peace with being outnumbered by women who are right.”
Theo looked a long time at the woman who was about to say something, and then at the woman holding his hand, and something that had stood up in him the whole of his short life sat quietly down.
“I have a word,” he said. “For you. I made it ages ago and have kept it until it was ready, and it is ready, I think, now, today, because of the chairs.”
“Have you?” Elinor said, very carefully, because she could hear that this was the centre of him. “I should like to hear it, if it is mine to hear.”
He let go of her hand to do it, which she understood, because some things must be said standing on your own two feet. Then he squared his small shoulders, as he squared them for a recitation not quite learned.
“Nor.” He flushed to the ears and pressed on, the way a small boy charges the last of a cold sea.
“It is from the end of your name, the Eli-nor, the part nobody ever uses, the bit left on the back where no one looks. Mama is Mama, and that is hers, and I cannot give it away, and now that I have seen her, I want it kept for her even more than before. Miss Wrenfield is gone. Your Grace is for strangers in the hall. So, I took the part of your name that nobody wanted and made it mine because nobody else was using it. Now it is the only thing in the whole house that is just yours and just mine and nobody else’s at all.
You can say no. You are allowed to say no to it. ”
She got down on the boards again, in her good grey wool, in front of his mother’s portrait, and did not say no.