Chapter 40
The Last Night
T he last day in Blackwood House was the twenty-eighth of June, a Friday, and the weather was the kind of weather that England produces in late June with the particular perversity of a climate that cannot commit to any single mood: the sky was grey, not with the darkness of rain but with the pallor of uncertainty, and the air was warm but not warm enough, and there was a breeze from the south-west that carried the scent of the river and the distant suggestion of thunder that would not, in the end, materialise.
It was a day that could not decide what it was, and the indecision was fitting, because I could not decide what I was, either, and the parallel was the kind of thing that I would normally have noted and dismissed, because noting parallels was a form of self-indulgence that I did not permit, but on this last day, in this last house, I permitted it, because the permissions were running out and the things I would not normally permit were, in their small way, the only liberties left to me.
I moved through the rooms with the attention of a person who is cataloguing what she is about to lose, and the cataloguing was both strategic and something else, something that I could not name and that I did not try to name, because the naming of it would require an emotional vocabulary that I did not possess and that I had spent my entire life ensuring that I would never need.
The drawing room was first. I stood in the doorway and looked at the room as though I were seeing it for the first time, and the seeing was different from the seeing I had done when I was the mistress of the house and the seeing was different from the seeing I had done when I was performing for guests and the seeing was different from the seeing I had done in the hours after the night I had first seduced Sebastian in this room, because the seeing now was the seeing of a person who knows that she will never see this room again, and the knowledge changed the quality of the light and the arrangement of the furniture and the smell of the lilies on the mantelpiece, and the change was not an improvement but a deepening, a sharpening of detail that made the room more real and more present and more painful than it had ever been before.
I had seduced Sebastian in this room. I had performed vulnerability and tenderness and the careful, calculated imitation of desire, and he had believed the performance, or he had believed it enough, and the believing had been the first step in a process that had led, through seven months of strategic manipulation and sexual exploitation and the systematic dismantling of his professional integrity, to this: a room I was about to leave, a man I was about to lose, and a life that was about to become something I could not yet imagine.
The study was next. I stood behind the desk where I had planned three murders and one staged suicide, and the desk was as I had left it, the surface bare except for the green leather blotter and the silver inkstand and the portrait of Edmund that was the only personal object in the room, and the portrait was of a boy who was not a boy but a young man with the mind of a child, and the portrait was the only thing in this house that I would miss, because the portrait was the only thing in this house that was real, and the reality of it was the reality of a creature who loved me without understanding me and who trusted me without reservation, and the love and the trust were, in the context of my life, the most valuable things I possessed, because they were the only things I had not acquired through strategy.
The kitchen was empty. Mrs. Branwell had been given notice and had departed three days ago, with a generous severance and a letter of recommendation that I had written myself, and the letter was, I acknowledged, the most honest letter of recommendation I had ever written, because it praised her cooking without exaggeration and her management of the household with accuracy and her discretion without reservation, and the honesty was possible only because I would never see her again and the letter would never be scrutinised by anyone who knew the circumstances of its composition.
The stillroom was at the back of the kitchen, behind the shelves of preserves and dried herbs, and the stillroom was where the locked cabinet had been, and the cabinet was gone now, removed by the Home Office representative who had come to inspect the premises and who had taken away the cabinet and its contents with the quiet, efficient thoroughness of a man who was accustomed to removing evidence and who did so without comment or curiosity.
The space where the cabinet had stood was empty, and the emptiness was conspicuous, because the cabinet had occupied that space for three years, and the occupation had left a mark on the wall, a lighter patch of plaster that was visible only in certain angles of light, and the mark was, I recognised, a metaphor, because every crime leaves a mark, even after the instrument of the crime has been removed, and the mark is always lighter than the surrounding surface, a ghost of presence that persists in the absence of the thing that made it.
Edmund's room was on the second floor, at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, and I stood in the doorway for a long time before I entered, because the entering was the thing I had been dreading, and the dreading was not fear and not sorrow and not the anticipation of grief but something else, something that occupied the same physical space as those emotions but which was none of them, and the something else was, I think, the closest thing to tenderness that my mind is capable of producing, a faint, cool sensation in the region of my sternum that was not warmth and was not pain but was something adjacent to both, something that existed in the space between what other people feel and what I am able to feel, and the existence of the space was itself a form of knowledge, because the space told me, with a clarity that was almost brutal, what my condition had cost.
Edmund was asleep. He was lying on his side with his hands folded beneath his cheek in the attitude of a child, which was the attitude he always assumed when he slept, because sleep reduced him to his essential nature, which was trusting and unguarded and entirely without the capacity for self-protection.
His hair was loose on the pillow, the colour of dried autumn leaves, and his breathing was slow and even and regular, and the rhythm of his breathing was the most honest sound in the house, because breathing is the one thing that cannot be performed, and the honesty of it was, in the context of a life built on performance, a thing of extraordinary value.
I sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress dipped beneath my weight, and the dipping did not wake him, because Edmund slept with the deep, untroubled sleep of a person who does not carry the weight of secrets, and the absence of weight was, I thought, one of the few genuine advantages of his condition, because the things that he could not understand were also the things that could not trouble him, and the inability to be troubled was, in a world that was full of things that troubled, a form of grace that I could not help but envy, though the envy was intellectual rather than emotional, because I do not envy in the way that other people envy, with a burning, acquisitive longing for what I lack, but rather with a cool, analytical recognition that what others possess and I do not is, in some circumstances, preferable to what I possess and others do not.
I touched his hand. The hand was warm and slack and entirely unresisting, and the touching produced, in the space where other people feel love, the faint, cool sensation that I have learned to recognise as the closest approximation of an emotion that my nature allows me to experience.
I do not love Edmund. I have said this before and I will say it again, because the saying of it is the only honest thing I can do in relation to him, and the honesty is necessary because the dishonesty — the pretence of love, the performance of maternal feeling, the simulation of tenderness that would be so easy to deploy and so impossible to sustain — would be a betrayal of the one creature in the world who deserves better than betrayal.
I do not love him. But I possess him, and the possession is, in the architecture of my mind, the thing that occupies the space where love should be, and the occupation is so thorough and so complete that the distinction between possession and love has become, for all practical purposes, irrelevant, because the effect is the same: I will protect him, I will provide for him, I will arrange his life so that he is safe and comfortable and cared for, and the provision and the protection and the arrangement are the outward expressions of an inward state that is not love but which serves the same function, which is to say, it directs my behaviour toward his welfare with a consistency and a ferocity that cannot be distinguished, by any external observer, from the real thing.
He stirred. His eyes opened, and they were the same grey as mine, but warmer, because the warmth was genuine and the genuineness was something I had never possessed and could never simulate with perfect accuracy, because the simulation of warmth requires an understanding of warmth that I lack, and the lack produces, in my performances of it, a quality of precision that is, to the trained observer, subtly wrong, like a portrait painted from a description rather than from life.