CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
“Your work at the university had made you far too comfortable saying the unsayable.”
“I teach young men to think about motives. It’s done me no good at all.”
His work concerned collective feeling, mass suggestion, grievance dressed as ideology, the emotional machinery beneath politics.
Men become ridiculous when frightened. Nations become worse.
Tonight, however, the most immediate psychology in the room sat opposite him in a perfectly cut suit and wanted a woman Archie liked on sight. That was harder to publish.
Duncan looked up again.
“You like her too.”
The line had no question in it. Archie considered lying for the dignity of them both.
He didn’t.
“Yes.”
Duncan nodded once, as if he had expected nothing less. Archie laughed softly. “You say that like it’s an inconvenience you saw coming.”
“It usually is.”
“That’s almost romantic.”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“Impossible. I’m half raised by tragedy.”
That, unexpectedly, made Duncan smile. Archie let the moment breathe, then said more, “She is unlike anyone you would have chosen.”
“I didn’t choose her.”
“No,” Archie said. “That seems to be the problem.”
Duncan looked down into his glass, though there was nothing left in it worth studying.
“She feels,” he said, and stopped.
Archie waited.
Duncan tried again. “She feels as though she arrived already in progress. As if I met her halfway through something rather than at the beginning.”
Archie felt a strange, immediate tenderness for him then. Trust Duncan to make desire sound like chronology.
“And that unsettles you?” he said.
“Yes.”
“And excites you?”
Duncan’s eyes came back to his face.
After a second, “Yes.”
Archie tipped his head back and laughed at the ceiling.
“What?”
“You are so much worse off than I thought.”
Duncan actually smiled then, openly enough to change the whole room.
Archie had to look away for a second, because there were only so many old injuries a man could survive gracefully in one night.
When he looked back, Duncan had seen more than he should have.
The smile faded, not into discomfort, but into something quieter.
They had done this before, this strange, careful dance with the truth.
Circled it. Touched it. Drawn back. Always because of circumstance, timing, decency, fear, class, women, family, the whole tiresome building blocks of life.
Yet the fact remained that when Archie imagined the body of his life, Duncan was in too much of it to be called merely a friend in the way ordinary men meant friendship. He was worse than that.
Better too.
Duncan said, “You never went back because of her.”
Archie did not ask who. There was no need. He knew Duncan was talking about his father’s second wife.
“No,” he said. “I never saw the point in volunteering for cruelty.”
Duncan’s mouth moved, half grimace, half sympathy. Archie shrugged, more lightly than the thing deserved.
“Hawarden was always nicer. You were always nicer. Even when you were impossible.”
“That is a highly qualified endorsement.”
“I stand by it.”
Duncan looked at him, then into the fire.
“My mother would have liked you.”
Archie’s smile failed at once.
For a second, he was fourteen again, standing in a house that had made room for him before he knew how badly he needed it.
“That,” he said after a moment, “is very unfair.”
“It’s true.”
“That doesn’t improve it.”
“No.”
There were tears in the back of his eyes for a second, which was ridiculous, because he was a grown man in a good coat with a university post, a cultivated laugh, and no desire at all to be sentimental about the dead.
He tried laughing instead.
It came out rougher than he intended. Duncan, perhaps mercifully, reached for the bottle and refilled both glasses without comment. Archie accepted his with a murmur of thanks and let the warmth steady him.
Then, because he could not leave the room in mourning when sex was available, even if only in theory, he said, “Tell me something indecent.”
Duncan stared at him.
“What?”
“Anything. About her. About yourself. About the look on your face when she walked into the drawing room dressed like temptation and poor judgment.”
Duncan laughed despite himself and rubbed one hand over his mouth.
“You are intolerable.”
“Yes. But I’m helping.”
“That is an extraordinary interpretation.”
Archie settled more deeply into the chair and grinned.
“Come now. Give me one honest sentence.”
Duncan looked into the fire for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had gone lower.
“I keep thinking about her wrist.”
Archie went very still.
He had not expected that.
“The tattoo,” Duncan said. “The feather. The fact that it had to be hidden. The fact that it was there at all.”
Archie let out a slow breath.
“Christ.”
“Yes.”
“That is indecent.”
“I know.”
He could picture it too easily. Ceci’s right wrist, gloved over in public, bare in private, that small black feather resting in such a vulnerable place. The sort of mark one would only notice if one were already looking too closely. Archie laughed, low and helpless.
“Oh, Duncan.”
“What?”
“That is infinitely worse than if you’d said her mouth.”
Duncan’s eyes flicked to him. “I’m also thinking about her mouth.”
That did it.
Archie laughed so hard he had to set the glass down for fear of losing it altogether. Duncan, who should have held the line and did not, laughed with him.
The sound went on longer than it should have, stripped of defense by whisky and fatigue and years of unsaid things finally finding a shape they could survive in. When it faded, Archie wiped one hand over his eyes and said, “Well. At least we are being honest.”
“Are we?”
“More than usual.”
Duncan looked down at his hands, then back up.
“Yes,” he said.
The word was almost tender.
That was too much.
Archie picked up the whisky again and smiled into the rim of the glass. “God help the three of us.”
Duncan’s gaze held his.
“Four,” he said.
He meant Sabrina too. Archie understood that at once. Sabrina would see every line of this long before any of them could pretend otherwise. Archie laughed once more and lifted his drink in surrender.
“To disaster,” he said.
Duncan touched his glass to Archie’s.
“To management,” he replied.
Neither of them said the simpler thing. Archie smiled into his whisky. There was the Duncan he knew. And somewhere beyond the dark glass, Ceci Bishop was carrying danger back toward the house like a flame cupped in both hands.