Chapter 40 #2
"Cecilia," he said, and his voice was thick with sleep, and the sound of my name in his mouth was a thing that I had heard ten thousand times and that affected me, each time, in precisely the same way, which was to say, it produced the faint, cool sensation in my sternum that was the closest thing to tenderness that I possessed, and the constancy of the sensation was, I acknowledged, itself a form of data, because constancy of response is not a thing that can be performed, and the fact that Edmund's voice produced the same sensation in me every time I heard it suggested that the sensation was real, whatever "real" meant in the context of a mind that was incapable of the emotions that other people called real.
"Go back to sleep," I said, and my voice was quiet, and the quietness was not performed but was the natural voice of a person who is in the presence of something fragile and does not wish to break it.
"Are you going away?" he asked, and the question was simple and direct and devastating, because Edmund's questions were always simple and direct and devastating, because he asked the questions that other people were too polite or too afraid or too strategically aware to ask, and the asking cut through every layer of performance and calculation and reached the thing beneath, which was the thing that could not be named.
"Not tonight," I said, and the answer was honest, because I was not going away tonight, though I was going away soon, and the distinction between tonight and soon was a distinction that Edmund could not fully grasp but which he accepted with the trusting simplicity that was his defining characteristic, because Edmund accepted everything with trusting simplicity, because Edmund did not have the capacity for suspicion, and the absence of suspicion was, in the context of his relationship with me, both a blessing and a tragedy, because the blessing was that he would never know what I was, and the tragedy was that he would never know what I was.
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed.
His hand, beneath mine, relaxed into sleep, and the relaxation was so complete and so trusting that it produced, in the space where other people feel grief, a sensation that I had not felt before, a sensation that was not grief but which occupied the same physical territory and which was, I thought, the thing that grief would feel like if I were capable of it: a tightening, a constriction, a sense of something being removed from a space that was not designed to accommodate its absence.
I sat with him for perhaps twenty minutes, watching him breathe, and the watching was the most honest thing I had done in this house, because the watching was not strategic and not performed and not designed to produce any effect in any observer, because there was no observer, and the absence of an observer meant that the watching was the first genuinely private moment I had spent in this room in three years, because even when I was alone in this room, I was performing for an imaginary audience of servants and visitors and the ceaseless, judging presence of the social world that monitored my every gesture and interpreted my every expression, and the absence of the audience, even for twenty minutes, was a liberation so small and so total that I could not fully appreciate it until it was over.
I rose. I left the room. I closed the door behind me with the soft, careful precision of a person who is closing a door for the last time and who wishes the closing to be silent, because silence is the only appropriate sound for an ending.
I went downstairs. The drawing room was dark, the gas turned low, and the shadows pooled in the corners like water collecting in the hollows of a rocky shore, and the room was beautiful in the darkness, more beautiful than it was in the light, because the darkness concealed the imperfections that the light revealed and left only the essential shapes: the curve of the sofa, the line of the mantelpiece, the portrait of Richard Ashworth above the fireplace, gazing down with the blank, aristocratic arrogance of a man who had never suspected that the woman standing before his portrait was the woman who had killed him.
I looked at the portrait for a moment and felt nothing, because the feeling of nothing was the only appropriate response to the image of a man whose death I had orchestrated and whose absence I had exploited, and the nothing was, in its own way, a kind of honesty, because the pretence of grief would have been a performance, and I was done performing.
The knock came at half past ten. It was a single knock, quiet and deliberate, and the quality of the knock told me who was standing on the other side of the door before I opened it, because Sebastian knocked the way he did everything, with a directness that was almost physical, a clean, hard impact of knuckle against wood that communicated presence without aggression and announced intention without threat.
I opened the door. He was standing on the step in the grey June evening, and he was wearing his usual clothes, the dark wool suit and the sensible boots and the heavy watch chain, and his face was the face of a man who had not slept and who had, in the absence of sleep, arrived at some kind of equilibrium that was not peace but was the closest thing to peace that his circumstances allowed.
He did not speak. I stepped aside, and he entered, and the entry was the entry of a man who has been in this house many times and who knows its geography and its customs and its particular quality of silence, and the familiarity of his presence in this space was, I acknowledged, the thing that made it different from all the other times he had been here, because this was the last time, and the knowledge of the lastness changed the quality of everything — the air, the light, the sound of the door closing behind him, the distance between us in the hallway, which was perhaps four feet and which had never seemed so significant and so irreducible.
"The case is closed," he said. His voice was flat, the flatness of a man who has emptied himself of everything and has nothing left to give, and the emptiness was different from the emptiness I had seen in him before, because the previous emptiness had been the emptiness of a man who was struggling, and this emptiness was the emptiness of a man who had stopped struggling, and the stopping was the thing that I recognised, because I had never struggled, not in the way that other people struggle, and the recognition of his surrender was, in the space where other people feel compassion, a faint, cool sensation that I could not name and did not try to name.
"I know," I said.
"You know." The words were not a question.
They were a statement of comprehension, and the comprehension was the comprehension of a man who has realised that the woman he is addressing has always known more than he has, and that the knowing more was not a function of intelligence, though she was more intelligent than he was, but a function of nature, because she was, by her own constitution, incapable of the kind of surprise that had characterised his entire experience of this case, because surprise requires the capacity for emotional investment, and emotional investment was the one thing that her training and her nature had systematically eliminated.
"Sit down," I said, and I gestured toward the drawing room, and he followed me, and we sat on the sofa, and the sofa was the same sofa on which I had performed vulnerability and tenderness and the calculated imitation of desire, and the sitting was different from the sitting that had preceded those performances, because this sitting was not a prelude to anything, it was not a strategic engagement, it was not a move in a game, it was simply two people sitting on a sofa in a dark room, and the simplicity of it was so unfamiliar that I did not know what to do with my hands.
We sat in silence for a long time. The silence was not the strategic silence I usually deployed, the silence that is designed to make the other person uncomfortable and to create a space that they will rush to fill with information or emotion or both.
This silence was different. This silence was the silence of two people who have said everything that can be said and who are now occupying the space that remains, which is the space of the unsayable, the space of the things that are too large or too complex or too dangerous for words, and the occupying of the space was, in its own way, the most intimate thing that had ever happened between us, because all the sex and all the seduction and all the strategic manipulation had been conducted through language, through the exchange of words and gestures and calculated expressions, and the silence was the first thing that had happened between us that was not mediated by performance.