CHAPTER THIRTEEN Wanting Is Not Choosing #2
“I stood on that rail and turned the listening inward, the way Kael showed me, and under everything else there it was, clear as a bell. I want to stand at Ilmarren. I don’t want it to save the northern quarter and I don’t want it for a woman I never met.
I want it because it’s the only place in the world where the thing inside me isn’t a disease. ”
“And you can’t tell if that’s yours.”
“I can’t. I never will. There’s no version of me that wasn’t built to want it, they started before I was born, there isn’t an original underneath to go and check against.” My hands had started shaking and I shoved them under my arms. “Thirty-four years refusing to take anybody’s choice off them, and it turns out mine was taken nine months and eleven days before I was anything at all. ”
Wind came over the wall. Down the hill somewhere a door banged, and then banged again, and nobody went to shut it.
“So you tell me the difference. A man looks at me across a tavern and gets up because I made him. I walk down to that gate because they made me. Where’s the difference? I’ve been looking for nine days and I can’t find it.”
? ? ?
Elias put the bucket down.
He came and stood in front of me. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t sit, either.
“I’m going to answer that, and you’ll have to let me do it badly first.”
“All right.”
“The man in the tavern. When you did it to him. Did he know?”
“No.”
“Ever? After? Any of them?”
“No.”
“Right. Well, that’s it. That’s the whole difference, and it isn’t a small one, and I’d like you to stop calling it a technicality.”
“It is a technicality.”
“It’s the entire thing.” He crouched down so he was below me, looking up, which is what he does when he wants to take the heat out of an argument.
“They arranged your wanting. Fine. On purpose, in writing, before you existed. Fine, granted, all of it. And then you went down there and read the slate, and now you know, and here you are sat on a wall in December telling me about it with grit under your nails.”
“Knowing doesn’t undo it.”
“No. Nothing undoes it.” He put his hand on the stones next to my knee.
Near me, not on me. “But a man who’s been made to want something and doesn’t know it’s been done to him has no moves at all.
None. That’s what you took off those men, that’s the monstrous part, and that’s exactly the thing nobody’s taken off you. ”
I looked at him.
“You can still go. Tomorrow, if you want. Stand at that gate and hold it sixty years, and it’ll be something you did with your eyes open, about a wanting you can put a name to.
Or you can refuse and be miserable in a very specific, very well-informed way for the rest of your life.
Both of those are real choices. A man who’s been Influenced and doesn’t know it gets neither. ”
The gate hung at the bottom of the yard, minding its own business.
“That’s a very thin difference.”
“It’s the only difference there’s ever been between anything and anything.”
? ? ?
Neither of us announced it.
We’d eaten. The fire had gone down to the red.
He had a book open on his knee and hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes, and I was on the settle with my feet tucked under me pretending I wasn’t counting.
The house was doing its creaks in their usual order, fourth stair, window frame, the beam over the landing.
“You’re not reading,” I said.
“I’m reading slowly.”
“You’ve been on that page since the soup.”
“It’s a difficult page.”
“What’s it about?”
He looked down at it. Then up. “Drainage.”
“Riveting.”
“I’m finding it very hard to concentrate,” said Elias, with tremendous dignity, “for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with drainage.”
I laughed. He didn’t. The laugh ran out somewhere between the settle and his chair and left the room very quiet.
Then I said his name.
That was all. I didn’t need anything else, because he shut the book without marking the page and put it down on the floor and looked at me, and his whole face went through something I haven’t got a word for even now, and he said:
“Are you sure?”
“If you ask me that more than once I’ll throw the lamp at you.”
“I’m going to ask it more than once.”
“I know. So it’s the lamp or me, Elias. Pick.”
“That’s hardly a fair fight. The lamp’s never done anything to me.”
“Come here.”
? ? ?
He came and knelt in front of the settle and took my face in both hands the way he had in the kitchen in October, whole palms, thumbs along the bones. He didn’t kiss me yet. He held my face and looked at it, like he was checking it against something he’d been keeping in his head.
“Say the thing.”
“What thing?”
“You know what thing. Once, out loud. So neither of us has to wonder about it in six months.”
I put my hands round his wrists. His pulse was going like a hare’s.
“Nothing’s making me. There’s nothing in the water and there’s nothing in my chest. I know what I want and it’s mine and it’s you. You great slow fool.”
“Right,” said Elias, and his voice came apart on that one word, and then he kissed me.
? ? ?
He wasn’t careful. I’d been afraid he would be, and his not being careful turned out to be the great mercy of the whole night.
I’d spent weeks bracing for tenderness. I’d pictured being handled like something that had just been glued back together, and I’d known that if he did it I wouldn’t survive it, and I’d have let him anyway, and it would have put a distance between us neither of us could ever have named.
Instead he put his hands in my hair and pulled, once, not gently, and said my name against my mouth like a man losing an argument he’d been wanting to lose for months.
I got the front of his shirt in both fists. A seam went. Neither of us cared.
The settle was an absurd place for any of it, and we got no further than the floor in front of the fire, which is flagstone with one rag rug on it that is far too small. I have a scar on my left shoulder blade from that night that I’ll carry till I die, and I have never once been sorry about it.
? ? ?
What I remember most is his hands. That they shook.
They didn’t at first. At first they were sure enough, undoing things, finding the ties at the back of my dress and getting the second one wrong and swearing at it under his breath, filthily and at great length, till I laughed into his shoulder and he said, “This is not helping,” and I said, “It’s helping me. ”
The shaking started after. When it was done and we were lying in a heap of our own clothes, fire on one side, cold flags on the other, his arm over me and his face pushed into the side of my neck, I felt his hand come up and settle flat in the middle of my back.
It was shaking badly.
“Elias.”
“Don’t.”
“Are you all right?”
He laughed. It came out wrecked.
“No. Not remotely. I shan’t be for a while, and I’d be grateful if you’d leave it be until the morning.”
So I left it be. I put my hand over his and held it there against my spine till it went still, which took a long time, and I didn’t say one word the whole while.
I counted his breaths instead and lost count and started over, and the fire ticked, and the too-small rug crept another inch towards the hearth, and that silence is the best thing I have ever given anybody. I’d put money on it.
? ? ?
Much later, in the bed, with the window going grey on us again, because apparently we were never going to get to sleep at a civilised hour for the rest of our lives:
“I’ve worked out what it was.”
“What what was?”
“The shaking.” He was on his back, looking up at the ceiling, running a finger idly over the shoulder blade that was going to scar. “It’s that you came up.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Thirty-four days. I went down to that cove twice a day for thirty-four days, and every time I went down those steps I did the sums on the way. What I’d do.
Who I’d tell. Whether I’d stay in this house or sell it.
How many years it would take before I stopped expecting you.
I had a whole second life worked out by the third week, Rose, down to the detail, and I walked into it twice a day like a man going off to work. ”
I turned my head on the pillow. There was a smear of soot on his cheekbone from the hearth. I licked my thumb and rubbed it off, and he let me, and shut his eyes while I did it.
“And tonight?”
“Tonight I finally had to put it down,” he said, “and my hands didn’t know what to do with themselves.”
I took one of them and laced my fingers through it, and gave it something to hold on to.