Damage Control, Part 1
by L. Inman
Elisabeth Bowen unlocked the door of her flat, hitching her shoulder to adjust for the weight of her bag, and let inertia carry her inside. She put down the bag in the foyer and began turning on lights.
To all appearances Brian had, despite the hectic rush of the end of term, been keeping her flat clean and well-managed. He had even, she noticed, neatened her desk into shaggy topic-oriented piles of books, papers, and index cards.
She felt a sudden, small pang of affection for him; and so after taking a shower, pinning up her wet hair, and donning clean jeans and a T-shirt, she picked up the phone and dialed his number.
“Hello?”
“Brian. It’s me.”
There was a silence.
“Hello?” Elisabeth said. “Hello?”
“I’m here,” Brian said after a moment, his voice oddly whiskered. “Where are you?”
“I’m home. That’s why I called.”
“I’m coming over,” he said instantly.
“Of course, you juggins,” Elisabeth said.
Brian had never made the distance from his flat to hers so fast. In what seemed like minutes she was opening the door to him and stepping back silently to let him enter, as was the custom of the vampire-conscious.
She started toward the kitchen, an offer of a late tea on her lips, but he caught her and pulled her into a crushing hug, with hands that meant to be gentle. Startled, but moved, she hugged him back with some force.
She waited, but he did not let go of her, and she began to squirm gently. “Brian,” she said, “my goodness. Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right,” he said as she extricated herself. “Are you?”
She met his eye steadily. “Yes.” She searched his face. “Are you sure you’re all right? Nothing’s happened, has it?”
“Of course it hasn’t,” Brian said. “I’m just glad to see you—is all.”
“Glad to see me alive,” Elisabeth said; the slight look of mortification that crept over Brian’s face told her she had read correctly his altered diction. She decided not to rub it in.
“I want to go out,” she declared.
“Right,” Brian said, “absolutely.” He glanced at his watch. “There’s Bach in the chapel tonight—if we go now we should be able to catch most of it, I should think.”
“Just what the doctor ordered,” Elisabeth said.
*
After the hug Brian’s Britishness reasserted itself, and he escorted her decorously to the chapel and into a back pew to hear what was left of the Bach program, without any undue fuss, the wild impulsiveness that had attracted her to him completely camouflaged in Oxfordian rectitude. He kept his eyes front, drinking in the music, and after a few moments’ musing Elisabeth did the same.
The Bach did for Elisabeth what merely thinking things through could not: the work to be done, the pieces to be picked up, the path to be walked—all lost their bloat of significance and fell lightly ahead of her. And the precise beauty of the music gave her back the mastery of her mind for a simple, buoyant moment that restored her confidence more than leaping back into reading would have done.
She was sorry when the last bow was drawn over the last string.
Afterwards,
still enraptured, she followed Brian out of the pew and into the quiet
Elisabeth tucked her chin down and forced her thoughts back to the music still echoing down the runnels of her nerves. But the charm was broken. She could see clearly now the guarded looks her peers were giving her, and though she was now obviously walking the streets in her right mind, her last appearance in College had been a dramatic and (she suddenly realized) quite publicly ignominious collapse. As if scratched for her on some waiting slate, the conversations wrote themselves in her head, her responses repressive and slightly high-pitched. Yes, I’m quite well now. Yes, I did have a collapse—wore myself out, you know. And there were personal matters causing me stress, you see, and everything at once—but I’m quite all right now. Yes, I do have some catching up to do. Thank you for the good wishes. Yes, it’s good to be back. Thank you. Thank you.
She ignored the faint qualm of nausea these reflections brought, and cheerfully agreed to accompany Brian to the pub.
*
She had been quite hungry earlier, but once the pub food was put down before her, it was suddenly as if she didn’t know what to do with it. At Brian’s wordless urging, she began to dig in, slowly, meditatively, then faster. In the end she managed almost to clean her plate. “I can get you more if you’d like,” Brian said eagerly, and she smiled at him, and shook her head.
When they got back to her flat it was late enough for the quiet to have descended almost completely over the streets. Elisabeth said, “Could you come in? Just for a moment while I….” She didn’t finish the sentence, but it wasn’t necessary; Brian knew she wanted him there while she looked under the bed and in all the closets, just in case.
He followed her throughout the flat, checking everything over after she had her turn; and when she circled back at last to the front door he trailed to an uneasy stop before her.
“Thank you,” she said finally.
“No problem,” he said. “I….” But he stopped, and the silence grew.
“I saw the people looking at me,” Elisabeth said gently.
Brian shoved his hands into his pockets. “Like to punch their lights out,” he muttered. “You’re all right.”
She offered him a little indulgent smile.
There was something Brian was trying to spit out, looked like; but in the end all he said was, “I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m glad I am too.” She waited to see if he would ask her where she had been; when he did not, she decided that either Anne had told him and convinced him to sit tight, or else he had reined himself in of his own accord. But then he spoke again, haltingly:
“Elisabeth—”
He stopped
again, and she decided to get it over with and tell him now. “I was in
He flushed and shook his head. “That wasn’t—I mean….I figured it out, after a while. That’s all right. I understand that. I do. I just—” He switched tracks abruptly. “You didn’t see him, did you?”
“Yes,” Elisabeth said, “I did. I waited till he came home, and then I left.” Indeed it was one of the things keeping her buoyant: she had seen him, and they both had survived.
Brian stood looking at her intently for a moment, then said: “Okay….” He drew a deep breath, then said more firmly: “Okay.”
Elisabeth lowered her chin and looked up at him gravely.
Brian sighed. Then sighed again, thinking. “So…,” he said finally, “I guess it’s over then.” He softened the end of his sentence into almost a question.
“As over as it’s ever going to be,” Elisabeth said ruefully; then realized Brian might not have been talking about the war.
Before she could ask, Brian said softly: “I’m damned sorry, Elisabeth.”
And she quailed from asking the question. She stood looking up at him helplessly, and at last said: “It’s going to take some time.”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I expect it will.”
A breath later he asked, moving a tentative hand as if to touch her elbow: “May I kiss you goodnight?”
The question, and his solid stance, told her what sort of kiss to expect. She swallowed dryly for a moment, and then was all right again. “Yes,” she said. “But—hang on—” Steady-handed, she removed her glasses and held them at her waist, hesitating, before looking up at him again. He was smiling, a little smile that seemed new to her before she realized that the lines of his face had been changed by a new trace of strain and care. She had not quite noticed it.
He bent close, his hand guiding her elbow, and she shut her eyes, wondering if she would have left her knowledge of how to kiss on the other side of her personal holocaust. But no such egregious awkwardness presented itself: Brian merely kissed her lips, and she kissed him back with the same patience and circumspection he was using to her.
She caught the scent of his flat on his skin and clothing, which evoked the memory of happier times, at the same time as she felt the little shudder that went through him. This, she knew, was not a specimen of the recreational snogging Brian engaged in at the drop of a hat, though it was certainly no less interested, no less seeking, than that. He pressed the kiss a little further, and she responded favorably without qualm. The encouragement moved him to slip a hand along her waist and draw her gently closer. She could sense, as strongly as if it were a scent, the odd mixture of his naked emotional need and the lack of self-interest with which he pressed his gift. It woke pain in her, but she did not flinch from him; she let the kiss end naturally, and lowered her chin when their lips parted.
He let his shoulders fall, and relaxed his touch on her. She raised her eyes to his.
She cleared her throat. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?” she said quietly.
He shut his eyes a moment and nodded, and she responded to the look on his face with a spontaneous soft hug, her glasses threaded through one hand on his back. He hugged her back, gently this time, and they stood like that silently for a minute.
“I’m glad to be home,” she murmured against his chest.
He did not answer in words, merely held her close an extra moment before letting go and stepping back.
“If you need anything, call,” he said.
“Understood,” she said.
She saw him out the door with a little smile. After it shut between them, she leaned against it for a moment, pressing a hand to the pain in her chest, before going resolutely away to get ready for bed.
She slept that night with most of the lights on.
*
“Let’s see, now—there’s the list of available summer tutors, and the list of lectures—”
Elisabeth shuffled through the unruly sheaf of papers. “And the balance sheet—”
“Right. You’ve got that, then. Good.” Dean Blakely rearranged the papers on his desk and neatly slotted them back into the manila file headed in his own awkward ballpoint, “Elisabeth Bowen—medical leave.”
“Thank you for putting all this together for me all at the end of term.” Elisabeth neatened the papers’ edges on her knee and slid them into her waiting satchel. She had dressed with care for this interview: after some frustrated dithering on the phone to Brian, she had nixed pastels (too waiflike, despite their harmony with her coloring), her solid black suit (too funereal, and though she had one or two things to mourn she didn’t want to look severe and gothic), and red (the color of crazy people, she had insisted over Brian’s bewildered protests), and chosen the black slacks, boots, and tailored oxford shirt she wore on business trips. In the end, it hadn’t mattered: Dean Blakely had welcomed her with his usual detached warmth and the interview had proceeded with the minimum of awkwardness.
The Dean did not wave away her thanks, but said merely, “It’s good to see you back on your feet.”
“It’s good to be back on my feet,” Elisabeth said, shooting him a grateful glance from her efforts to organize her satchel at her feet. “It was touch-and-go there for a while.”
“Yes.” The Dean paused, then broke into a small, diffident smile that reminded her painfully of Rupert. “It seems rather a miracle, doesn’t it.”
Elisabeth smiled, her first unforced smile since—it seemed—forever. “It certainly seems so to me, sir.”
Her satchel was latched shut, and all that remained of the meeting was the leavetaking.
“Get on with you,” the Dean said, picking up his pen and offering her one more affectionate glance over his glass-rims.
Elisabeth got on, cautiously rejoicing.
*
After the initial juddering start, Elisabeth’s life back at
home in
She sifted through all the notes she had made from Christmas on, and decided after half-a-night’s stunned frustration to trash the lot of them and start over. It ought to have felt like failure, but it didn’t: there was light, sweet freedom in clearing all the sticky-notes from her books and starting with fresh, blank paper and index cards.
She avoided mirrors whenever possible, but that was nothing new either; and whatever her books could offer her in the way of self-reflection caused only the echo of pain.
Instead of getting up the nerve to call Anne, Elisabeth settled for showing up at church on Sunday and crossing her fingers that Anne wouldn’t be offended by her reticence. She thought she might have caught her priest’s eye once during the sermon, but the change in Anne’s face had been too negligible at that distance for Elisabeth to be sure. With trepidation in her thoughts and spiritual hunger ghosting her body, Elisabeth went forward for communion and knelt at the rail, hands up. She lifted her eyes to Anne’s face when she came round with the paten: there was joy and greeting in the vicar’s eyes—the body of Christ, the bread of heaven—and then she passed on in a soft rustle of vestments leaving Elisabeth elated, with the wafer in her nested palms—unprepossessing, but sustenance indeed.
At the church door she arranged to have tea with Anne the next day at the vicarage; she went, accordingly, and found that they did not need to say much after all. Anne inquired after Rupert and the Sunnydale war as after a foregone conclusion; Elisabeth knew that the general result of the war must be moderately obvious to the priest, who had been observing the world with her usual acuity. In other news, Anne had started work on her Visitation icon, and they had a fine lively conversation about the act of prophesying and other moments of recognition. Elisabeth went home without having explained much of anything to Anne but feeling unburdened nonetheless.
All in all, Elisabeth’s reassimilation into her own life was proving to be remarkably easy, like putting on old, familiar clothing and forgetting all about it. The old rhythms came to her hands with only half a thought, and she paused only at rare moments to wonder at it.
It wasn’t till a number of days had passed that she realized that the very ease of returning was making possible that check in her thoughts moment to moment, remembering him, waiting for him, worrying about him, mourning him. He had not called, or written, and she knew it was not because he was busy, though undoubtedly he was. He had not called or written because that was not what Rupert Giles did: he showed up at your door unannounced in the small hours, or broad afternoon, or sweet dark evening, and said his piece, or picked his fight, or asked your help, or kissed you consumingly, or thrust you to the wall and twisted your wrist to the finest, most exquisite point of agony—
If he did come, Elisabeth reflected one afternoon with her pencil point suspended a few millimeters above the surface of a blank sheet of paper, the small talk would be untenable. And if he did not come....
Elisabeth wasn’t sure what she would do if he did not come. Just keep going, she supposed. Maybe, eventually, cry, though she was very bad at it and didn’t foresee herself having any better success now that she knew grief to its worst depth.
She decided tenuously to give him six months; and if he didn’t come she would write him a letter and let him go. Mostly for her own sake, not his.
A long letter.
*
The problem, Rupert Giles reflected as he buttoned his overcoat, is that having the ball in one’s court gives one a myriad possible wrong choices.
When you are ready, come to Oxford, and we will talk, she had said in her note. It didn’t say how he would know he was ready. It didn’t say what sort of “coming to Oxford” would be welcome, it didn’t say how long they would talk, it didn’t say whether she planned to forgive him, it didn’t say what to do in the event that she didn’t—or in the event that she did, for that matter. It didn’t say any of those things.
She had left all that up to him, which seemed to betoken either a reassuring trust in him, or an indifference to the mechanics of their breakup, and Rupert didn’t know which would be more hubristic to think. So he dithered for days, in between wiring money and assembling files and making phone calls, even though he had considered himself “ready” from the moment he read the note.
And he was afraid. He was so afraid that it finally came to the point one morning where he realized that if he didn’t get up the courage to see her today, he never would. Before he could think too hard about it, he got up, dressed and shaved quickly and carefully, and propelled himself out the door.
By the time
he arrived in
And as if
it knew and disapproved,
It was more
for desperate refuge than anything else that made him go into one of a small
row of bookshops not a far walk from
He put back the small octavo George Herbert he had been perusing and moved up the aisle to the front of the store: and suddenly found himself face-to-face with someone he knew.
“You,” Brian Whitaker said from between his teeth.
Rupert saw the fist coming—and hell, it wasn’t a particularly well-thrown punch—but he was tired and his reaction time was not what it had been. It connected with a crack and a dark flash, and he reeled sideways and backwards, fetching up against a glass upright display case, which cracked dully at his impact.
Brian sailed in, ready with another one; but the first one had snapped Rupert instantly into survival mode, and he was ready too. Before Brian could land another punch, Rupert caught him, spun and shoved him against the display case, which now shattered. His hands went for the man’s throat, but Brian managed to get a knee in and flung him back against a shelf. Rupert, completely unmindful of the domino slither and thump of falling books, lurched forward again and got in two good ones before clutching for Brian’s throat again. He’d just gotten a good grip when he was bundled aside and half-smothered in a large bear hug. Brian, not yet restrained, flung himself madly at his face; it took two spectators to haul him back by the arms and get him out of reach. Brian’s face was flushed hot. “You—bastard—” he gasped, “—bastard—”
The battle-madness was fading from Rupert’s senses. He stood, no longer needing the restraining arms round him, and watched as Brian was manhandled back and urged toward the door. At last Brian went, shouting hoarsely on the threshold, “You stay away from her!” Outside, he pointed furiously at Rupert through the front window, before stalking off, bleeding from the lip.
It was only left then for Rupert to look round him at the damage that had been done: a display case destroyed, a shelf upended, books everywhere. He looked up from one unfortunate tome lying open at his feet, the threads of a pulled signature showing, to the stricken face of the bookshop’s owner, and heard a deep sigh that he recognized for his own.
“Oh dear,” Rupert said.
*
Elisabeth got off the phone with her old boss, Mr. Edwards, and finished writing out the notes she was making on book buys. Next week she planned to work in a trip or two, just to boost her income a little.
She had just got out her planner and was beginning to transfer some of the notes to the calendar when a loud, urgent knock sounded at the door. Elisabeth went to check the peephole, her pulses suddenly fluttering.
It was Brian. She opened the door to him and he edged swiftly inside, talking.
“I reckon you can stay with me,” he said. “He doesn’t know where I live, that’ll buy us some time.”
“What are you talking about?” Elisabeth squinted after him as he strode further into her flat. “And what happened to your mouth?”
Brian swiped at the blood with his fingers and brought them away to look at it. “Bastard,” he muttered, digging for his handkerchief.
“What—happened,” Elisabeth said.
“You do have a bag, right,” Brian said. “It won’t take long to pack.”
“Brian.” Elisabeth folded her arms.
“Bastard hit me,” Brian said, wiping feverishly at his fingers with the handkerchief, then dabbing at his lips.
“Who hit you?”
“Who do you think!”
Elisabeth stared at him, shaking her head. The faintest of possibilities was beginning to suggest itself to her, but her brain seemed to have jammed.
He looked up at her and said impatiently, “It was your bastard of an ex-boyfriend that did this to me.”
“Rupert hit you?”
He hooted a laugh. “You’re surprised?”
“But why? You mean he just attacked you?”
“He’s a madman,” Brian said. “He got his hands round my throat. He’d’ve choked me if someone hadn’t pulled him off.”
“And you didn’t do anything to provoke him?”
Brian stared at her. “Provoke him? I had to have provoked him?” His voice shot up a few notes.
Elisabeth’s brain suddenly clicked back into action. “You hit him first,” she said, in the voice of understanding.
“I—” Brian’s face belied any denial he might have tried to make.
She flushed. “What are you, stupid or something?”
“Oh, don’t come over all John Spencer with me—”
“I’m perfectly serious. Are you stupid? Are you certifiable? What the hell were you thinking? You know he just got done fighting in a war—”
“He was
crazy before he ever fought that war, and anyway I don’t care if he just fought
“
“All the more reason why I’m not going to just sit around while he stalks you,” Brian said, with energy.
Elisabeth broke into a disbelieving laugh. “You think he’s stalking me?”
“Why else
would he be in
“Because I asked him to come here,” Elisabeth said flatly.
There was a short silence. Brian let the hand holding his handkerchief drop to his side. “You asked him to come here,” he repeated.
“Yes. I told him that when he was ready he should
come to
“That’s not gonna happen,” Brian said, with a final, dismissive headshake.
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t let it,” Brian said.
For a split second Elisabeth went perfectly still, gathering fury. Then she exploded.
“What, are you trying to Austin Grey me now?” she said. “You’ve got no business—”
Brian went white, and raised his voice to match hers. “I’m not some stupid swain meddling in your affairs. Goddammit, I’m your best friend!”
Elisabeth’s answer came low and savage. “Then act like it.”
In the silence that followed, they stood breathing hard, the beginnings of deep dismay creeping over them as the hurt set in. Finally Elisabeth pulled off her glasses and pinched at the bridge of her nose. “Where’s Rupert now? Do you know?” She took her hand away enough to glare at Brian.
Still white in the face, Brian averted his eyes from her, and answered her in a dull tone. “I don’t know. He was still in St. Andrew’s Bookstore, last I saw.”
Elisabeth’s continued silence prolonged the shock eating the room. Finally Brian looked at her. Her face was drawn and stony, eyes slightly wide. When she spoke, her words dropped lightly into the silence and only served to highlight it.
“You picked a fight in a bookstore?”
Brian didn’t answer, and she repeated the question, louder.
“You picked a fight in a bookstore?”
“I—that was—he was—” Brian stopped, unable to think of a good defense.
“This is—I can’t—” Elisabeth made to put her glasses back on, but gave up and uttered another little unfunny laugh. “Just go,” she said to Brian. “Just—go.”
“Elisabeth—”
“No. I can’t deal with you right now. Just go.”
He hesitated, but Elisabeth gestured toward the still-open door with her glasses, and he finally went. On the threshold he paused to look back at her to make one last appeal. “Don’t—don’t do anything—”
He stopped.
“Stupid?” Elisabeth finished, without humor. “I’ll try.”
Brian turned without another word and strode out, leaving the door wide open.
*
In the back room of St. Andrew’s Bookstore, Rupert took the
makeshift ice-pack away from his jaw to sip at a styrofoam cup of hot
peppermint tea. The tea was horrible,
but Mr. Carnagey had run out of
Rupert took the tea, though he didn’t have a sour stomach. Yet.
He had no idea how he was going to explain himself to Elisabeth. It wasn’t as if he could keep her from finding out: even if he hadn’t got a bruised face, there was Brian Whitaker to consider. He was probably with her now, rousing her sympathy and indignation, as if he needed that on top of everything else. It wasn’t fair.
And so Rupert was not at all surprised when the phone rang and Mr. Carnagey began to have a very ominous conversation.
“Ah, yes, and what can I do for you?...Oh, yes, the incident. Well, I’m not rightly sure what happened exactly—Mr. Giles came in; and then Mr. Whitaker came in, I suppose about that Gibbon he called me about the other day; and I suppose they saw each other, and I looked up and Mr. Whitaker was throwing a punch at Mr. Giles. He didn’t look ready for it, but he fought back and we had to restrain them both; and then Mr. Whitaker left before we could send for the police to sort it out...Well, there’s a glass upright display case shattered, though none of the contents were harmed, thank God; a shelf upended, but all the books seem to be all right except one, and that I think we can repair...Oh that’s very kind of you, Miss Bowen, but Mr. Giles has already assured me he is good for the damages...Oh, don’t apologize, please—these things happen, you know...Ah—yes. Yes, he’s still here. One moment, please.” Heavy footsteps, then Mr. Carnagey reappeared in the back room with the cordless phone in his hand. “Telephone for you, Mr. Giles.”
Rupert put down the noxious tea and took the phone as Moses might have seized the tail of the staff-snake at God’s command. “Hello?”
“Rupert,” Elisabeth said, in a cordial voice not unlike Buffy’s when she was really pissed off. “Are you all right?”
He stammered, glancing around as if looking for the answer. “Um—er—yes.”
“Then I want you at my flat within ten minutes. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“I’ll have
to—” But she had already hung up.
“—walk,” he finished lamely. He
had just remembered his car was on the other side of
Rupert stood up wearily. He was getting too old for all this. “I have to go,” he said, putting the icepack down next to the tea. “Thanks for the tea. Here—” he rummaged in his burberry for a card— “here’s my number if you need to get into touch with me.”
As he let
the bookstore’s door fall shut with a small tinkle of the bell and set off down
the street toward
Perhaps the interview would be mercifully short.
*
Elisabeth put down the phone and stood staring unseeing at the wall, moving only to breathe. Her thoughts, and the emotions that went with them, flashed through her mind like blurred pennants, and they cycled over each other, again and again, until Rupert’s shadow fell over the threshold of the door which Elisabeth had not bothered to shut.
“Hello?”
She waited until he stepped tentatively into view. He stopped when he saw her standing by the desk, his face pale and leaden.
Elisabeth made a small movement as if to go to him on the instant, but checked herself and drew in, and for a moment did not move at all.
Then, instead of going to him, she moved slowly around the couch, toward the kitchen, so that she was facing both him and the open door.
They stood for a long moment, wordless and apprehensive, before Elisabeth inquired coldly:
“A brawl in a bookstore?”
Rupert had no more ready a defense than Brian had. His only answer was a mute tip of the head.
“A brawl in a bookstore?” Elisabeth repeated.
With an obvious effort Rupert moved himself to answer. “Well—I must say—in my defense, he st—”
“I don’t care that he started it. A brawl in a bookstore?”
Rupert could not answer this, and she continued.
“What were you thinking? You could easily have killed him. And I don’t necessarily want him to fight my battles, but I hardly think he deserves that much retaliation for trying to chastise you—”
“In case you didn’t notice,” Rupert said, roused to anger, “he’s just fine. And I wasn’t thinking about retaliation or chastisement or anything else—he hit me, and I had to fight. That is all.”
She stared at him, hardily, for a moment, and then said quietly: “I get that. But it doesn’t make it right.”
His lips thinned taut. “I don’t get the impression,” he said, “that you’re seeing the matter from my point of view. But Brian got here first.”
Elisabeth bristled. “Brian,” she said, “has been here for me. Even before he understood what was happening; and he does now, so he has no excuse.” She added, quieter, “I owe him a lot.”
Rupert lowered his chin, in what could have been a gesture either of shame or defiance; Elisabeth couldn’t tell. The light from the open door behind him left his face in shadow.
“He thinks you’re stalking me,” she said, with the faintest hint of humor in her voice.
In response, Rupert gave a little hoot of a laugh, without raising his head.
“He wasn’t reassured when I told him I asked you to come here. I sent him home with a flea in his ear.”
She could see his throat move in a heavy swallow. “I didn’t mean to—this isn’t how I wanted to come. I wanted—”
Tears rose in Elisabeth’s eyes. “It isn’t very much different,” she said, “from the other times you’ve come.”
He gave a small, bitter laugh. “Yes, I seem to manage to bring calamity almost every time....”
“It isn’t the calamity,” Elisabeth said. “It’s—my helplessness.” She was going to elaborate, but her throat closed painfully and it was all she could do to keep her composure.
His head sunk even further.
She sniffed, took her glasses off and laid them down on the end table, then faced him again. “Rupert: why did you come here?”
He looked up at her, his face blank with surprise. “You asked me to.”
Evidently he had been expecting his response to be satisfying, for dismay crept into his face when he saw her begin to lose the battle with her tears. He tried again: “And I wouldn’t dare refuse you anything you asked.” He flinched visibly to see she had begun crying silently in earnest. “I wanted—” his voice deepened in appeal— “to make anything right if I could.”
At this last, her tears slowed, and with measured steps she went toward him. He did not move as she approached, and stood silent meeting her eye when she stopped before him.
She spoke, one small, simple appeal: “Do you love me?”
The dismay sharpened in his eyes. After a moment he gave a small nod.
With ten times the sharp efficiency Brian had used in his impulsive attack, she raised her small, square hand and slapped him hard across the face. Then, breathing quickly, she subsided and waited for his reaction.
Her blow had knocked his head to the side: for a moment, he held it there, eyes closed, then righted himself before her with gaze downcast. At his sides his open hands moved convulsively once, then twitched and were still.
She waited till she had his eyes before she said again: “Do you love me?”
There was a white-and-pink mark on his face the shape of her hand. He sucked in his lips a moment, eyes bright, swallowed, and answered with his voice this time. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.
She hit him again, and again he made no move to resist, though she waited to see if he would anger. His control was indeed fading; but it was grief, not anger, that was showing through. He righted his head again, the mark on his face turning a blistering red, the brightness in his eyes urged to the most exquisite point of pain.
She was weeping now. “Do you love me?” she asked him, and did not know that the note in her voice matched that of the night he had forced her to beg for her life.
“Yes,” he just managed to answer, and shut his eyes, waiting for her to hit him again. But instead she reached out and gripped fistfuls of his shirt and clung there, weeping, for a moment; then finally allowed herself to flow to him, to let go his shirt and slip her arms around him, to burrow herself in his warmth and scent and hold him, to cry without courage.
For the longest moment he did not embrace her in return, and she did not know why until she felt the faint, tentative touch of his shaking hand on her hair, and realized that the visceral trembling between them was not all her own. After a moment he gathered her in closer and held her, rocking slightly, and they clung like that, neither of them knew how long.
But when she lifted her head to seek his mouth, he resisted; he flinched away from her kiss with a small whimper, but she followed him insistently, and at the same moment began to urge them, with many tugs and nudges, down the hall to her bedroom.
He struggled as if against a whitewater current—“Please—’Lis’beth—don’t—” but she had gained them momentum, and in the end they flopped together awkwardly onto her bed, and she rolled him over, clasping one of his hands in hers and pinning it down into the coverlet, and kissed him with force, and he drew a long, shuddering breath and kissed her back.
But they could not sustain it; and at last she collapsed upon his heaving chest and spent the last of her tears, limp and exhausted, like a child.
The exhaustion drew from them the urge toward drama, and they lay for a little while sniffing and swallowing and trying to think what to say next. At last Elisabeth shut her eyes and let out a long sigh. “I was afraid you weren’t going to come,” she murmured.
“I was afraid to come,” he said, his free hand moving along her shoulder in tiny strokes.
She left her eyes shut. “I know.”
Anything else they said would only highlight the looming truth that neither of them knew what they were going to do now. To delay the inevitable, Elisabeth sat up wearily and plucked two tissues from the box on her nightstand, handed one to him, and blew her nose squelchily with the other. “You’re still wearing your coat,” she said, with a little laugh.
He lifted his head and looked down along his length; both his clothing and his burberry were badly rumpled, and there was a little tear in his coatsleeve where the shattering glass of the display case had cut it. He wriggled up to rest his head against her headboard, looking at her; belatedly he remembered the tissue in his hand and began to mop lightly at the tearstains on his face.
She took a small shivery breath and let it out in a sigh. He looked up at her with the faintest of wry smiles.
“I’m not sure what to do next,” he said.
She broke into a pained little laugh.
“I don’t suppose we’d have got even this far without Brian’s—er—inadvertent assistance.”
She laughed again and wiped her nose with the wadded tissue. “No, I don’t think that was the kind of use he meant to be to me.” She looked at his face; his jaw was starting to swell and bruise over, and she could see the faint marks left from her own blows.
“Should we try to talk, d’you think?” he asked tentatively.
She gave a limp shrug. “I don’t think I have any words,” she said.
“Not even an apposite quotation?” he asked. His wistful look went straight to her heart.
“No...,” she said, “unless it’s Gerard Manley Hopkins. No worst, there is none,” she quoted sadly; “pitched past pitch of grief....” She lost the thread of quotation for a moment, sighed, and took it up again. “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.” She thought she had used all her tears, but her eyes burned again and filled. “Nor does long our small durance deal with that steep or deep....I lost my sanity for a while,” she confessed in a small voice, her brimming eyes cast down to her crossed legs.
He said nothing and after a moment she looked up to see that he was looking at her, his eyes also wet. There was a silence while they shared the gaze; then Rupert said:
“I’m sorry. I could have helped you. I hurt you instead.”
She broke the gaze, swallowed, and sat looking into her lap as before, letting his words sit between them.
After a long silence, she said, seeking after meaning with each word: “I loved you with everything in me that was good.” She came to the end of the sentence without reaching the meaning she wanted, and ended up having to leave it there, helplessly. She did not even know whether she was trying to form an accusation or a formula for comfort, or which she should attempt. She was still thinking about it when he sat up and got up from the bed, moving slowly, like a man half again his age.
He was at the door when she said, “Where are you going?”
He turned, eyes brimming. “Aren’t you sending me away?”
She blinked. “No. What...Rupert—what—?”
“You used the past tense,” he said softly. “You said you ‘loved’ me.”
She sat straighter, understanding. “Rupert: it was a chronological past tense. Not an absolute.”
He swallowed, keeping his eyes on her face. “Then I can stay?”
“Yes,” she said, with a fragile steadiness. “I want you to stay.”
He ratcheted in a breath, fighting for, and winning, his composure by the skin of his teeth. He moved slowly back into the room, taking off his burberry and laying it on the foot of the bed, and sat down achingly next to her, gripping his knees and breathing. She scooted a little more so that she sat facing him, and then uncrossed her legs altogether and let them hang over the bedside next to him.
After a moment he turned to her, and, hesitating at first, reached out two fingers to tuck a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear. His hand lingered, to stroke the round of her cheek gently. In response she moved to hug him again, without hurry or trepidation, and they sat at last, calmly embraced, free to untether their affection.
“D’you think any of this is going to get easier?” she mumbled into his shirt.
He lifted his lips from her hair to echo her quote— “No worst, there is none” —and she groaned.
“At least,” she said, “we might be able to have some tea without disaster.”
“Can it be real tea?” he asked, helping her to stand with him. “Mr. Carnagey gave me some peppermint stuff that he said he keeps for his stomach. I think it actually gave me a stomachache.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling; “it can be real tea.”
They went out into the livingroom, and Elisabeth let out a little laugh. “I’ve left the door open,” she said, “all this time.” She went to the threshold and looked out. “I don’t see your car.”
“It’s
parked in a visitor’s lot above
“You should bring it round,” she said. “Before dark.”
They decided after a moment’s conference that they should both go. Elisabeth shoved on some sandals and grabbed a windbreaker, and they walked and bussed by turns through the city to where Rupert was parked, without hurrying and without saying much. On the way back home they stopped at an Indian restaurant and got takeout, which, back at Elisabeth’s flat, they ate on her bed, piled under two afghans, with the cool spring air flowing in through the open bedroom window. After their dinner, they stacked the empty containers on the edge of her nightstand, and Elisabeth changed into pajamas and washed for bed. She lent Rupert a toothbrush, locked up for the night, and crawled under the covers, on the side that used to be hers in the days they had shared a bed.
He joined her, hesitating only a little, for they were both so tired they could scarcely keep themselves upright. Belatedly she sat up and reached to turn out the bedside lamp, but he said, “No—leave it on if you want.”
“You don’t mind?”
He shook his head, and she subsided back under the covers.
Not quite touching, and each a little nervous at the fact, Elisabeth and Rupert nevertheless sank into an exhausted sleep almost at once.
*
In the middle of the night Elisabeth woke suddenly to find that the lamp was off and she and Rupert were in darkness. She thought perhaps he had turned it off after all, and reached for the switch, but turning the switch produced no result. The bulb must have burnt out, she thought. But perhaps something more sinister was happening. She struggled up to listen to her flat, waiting, breathing down panic.
Nothing. Except she became aware as she waited that
her bedfellow was shivering uncontrollably in his sleep, making sounds in his
throat that were not quite voiced. She
listened to him: he was not dreaming, she knew, only quaking under the
unconscious threat gathering in his pulses: poor in durance, as
Gently she eased a hand over his chest and embraced him—slowly so as not to startle him—and nestled a foot between his calves, drawing him closer. She closed her eyes, drawing in his scent with her breath, and held him thus, and his shivering began to subside.
It seemed to her then, as she drifted back toward sleep, that an old knowledge was uncovered for her: her love for him had not died, and would remain, whatever else happened. In his sleep he turned to her and accepted her embrace, and she fell back asleep sharing her warmth, and imbibing his.
*
Morning light, and human movement, drew Elisabeth awake. Her head hurt a little, and she wondered why until she remembered all the crying she had done the day before. She left her eyes closed, gradually wakening to the fact that he also was beginning to wake: and to touch her. His hand drifted steadily over her stomach with the inexorability of a glacier and the warmth of a small sun, and he was nuzzling her, his day’s growth of beard gently sandpapering her cheek; he was altogether warm and ineffably male, and without having to think Elisabeth responded in one long indrawn breath, throwing her arm free of the covers to crest the round of his shoulder.
The increasing urge to embrace gathered in them both, waking them fully, and she opened her eyes to meet his at close range; the expression in the hazel depths was one of mingled uncertainty and longing, and together they shared a look that said: Well, if it’s going to happen, it may as well happen now....
He bent again, to brush a kiss along her cheekbone, trailing it down to her ear and the soft skin under her jaw; his hand meanwhile found its way under the hem of her little T-shirt. She moved her hand and renewed her knowledge of the angle of his shoulder, the set of his ear, the soft ruffle of his hair.
With uncanny dexterity his hand moved south to work her underwear off her hips. She helped him, and helped herself afterward to a caress of his skin under his T-shirt, which he pulled away from her long enough to strip off. She kicked her underwear out from under the covers onto the floor.
She had thought she had not forgotten the taste of his skin, the feel of the hard curves of his body, but now that she had them again she delighted in the fresh sense of them, at first cautiously, then riotously, urgently; and judging from his alacrity his sensations were but little different.
With a faint thought as of wonder if this still works?, she slipped a hand down between them and grasped him, smoothly, firmly: he made a little sound, the least of his responses, and began to fumble for the handle of her nightstand drawer. There was the sound of Indian takeout cartons tumbling to the floor.
“Shit,” Rupert said. “I think you’ve got cold mulligatawny on your floor now.”
She broke into a laugh all the more unexpected for its heartiness.
She helped him with the condom. Neither of them now could keep their breath, and they hurried together, fumbling awkwardly, to reach fruition; she threw her head back with a voiced gasp, and he settled into her, moving in close, short strokes.
Their mutual urge shifted from a simple desire to one in which each strained in parallel for closeness with the other: gripping, lifting, frantically caressing, they sealed themselves together with equal parts clumsiness and finality. By the time it was finished, they were both shaking and clinging to one another with a desperation that left yesterday’s drama completely behind, a desperation too absolute even for tears.
She recovered first, eyes watering into her temples from the shock, and looked up at the ceiling, regaining her breath and feeling him, in all his weight, trembling in every fiber.
“Oh, God,” he uttered softly against her hair.
He subsided upon her, shaking, and lifted his head to touch his face to hers. She lifted a hand to stroke his hair. “I missed you,” she whispered.
“Oh God. I missed you too.” His hand moved in a small caress along her ribs. “Elisabeth...you’ve grown so thin.” She had never heard his voice so small. She held him close and quieted him: she could comfort him now, now that they had met on equal ground.
“Shh,” she murmured. “It’s just flesh, Rupert. It’ll come back. It’s guaranteed to, you know: I’ve hit the magic age of thirty.”
He did not laugh at her joke. Instead he lifted his head to look her in the face. “I want to see you in full health again,” he said.
“Stay here,” she said, stroking his cheek, “and help make it happen.”
He offered her a faint smile. “You don’t have anything pressing today?”
She thought. “I have some work in the afternoon. But it needn’t take long. How about you?”
“I—” He stopped, looked over at her alarm clock, and went pale. “Oh my God.”
“What? What, Rupert?”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I have to go.”
“What is it?”
“A
conference call. Nobody has a fixed
number but me. They’re all going to call
my flat in
She said reasonably, “When do you have to be there to take the call?”
“If I leave right this minute,” he said, tensely, “I might just make it.” But instead of getting up he buried his face in her shoulder and groaned.
Elisabeth, without really having to think about it, found herself accepting the situation with a wry fatalism. “Well, you’d best get up then,” she said, prodding him.
“I’m sorry,” he groaned.
“C’mon, Rupert.” She heaved at him from beneath, and finally he raised himself from her and sat on the edge of the bed, feeling around under the covers for his boxers and cleaning himself up at the same time. She picked up her underwear from the floor, skinned into it, and grabbed her kimono from the chair. “I’ll make you some tea for the road. You go wash up right quick.”
She padded into the kitchen to make the tea, and was thankful to hear the sink in the bathroom start. By the time Rupert had pulled on yesterday’s clothes and shrugged into his burberry, she was ready with a go-cup of tea, the tag and string hanging out from under the cap. He took it from her gratefully, and looked down at her, cocking his head ruefully. “It really is too bad of me to—”
She shut him up with a kiss, and he used his free arm to gather her into a strong embrace. They stood like that a long moment, defying time; then he pulled away and said, “I’ll come back.”
“Oh, Rupert,” she faltered, “please don’t—don’t promise—”
“It’s not a promise,” he reassured her hurriedly, “it’s just—just—I’ll come back.”
He moved quickly to the door and opened it. “If you need anything, call me,” he said over his shoulder. “Please.” She nodded, and managed to blurt out as the door was closing— “Godspeed—”
And then the door was closed, and he was gone.
Elisabeth smoothed down the front of her loose-belted kimono, breathed out heavily, and turned to the livingroom at large.
“I can do this,” she said quietly; “I can do this.”
*