Home Repairs
Chapter One: A Place of Disaffection
by L. Inman
Go, go, go, said the
bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much
reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and
what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
—T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets
“Come to my house,”
Rupert said.
Elisabeth took a measured glance at
him over her shoulder. He was dressed
now, but lay sprawled catlike on her bed as if he meant to lounge there
forever, though they both knew he was leaving in a few minutes. She made no answer at first, merely fastened
her bra at her back and reached for her silk shirt. “Are you sure you really want me to?” she
said, eyes on her hands buttoning, down and down.
“It’s not an idle request,” he said,
a little testily.
“I know,” she said. “But maybe it’s not such a good idea.”
His voice softened. “I don’t like being apart from you.”
It was no answer, but she responded
anyway: her glance, meeting his, made
him drop his head on his arm with a small, boyish smile. The boyishness hadn’t failed yet to surprise
her; he was pushing fifty, and she had expected a lover of his age, and
gravitas, and previous catalogue of suffering to be…what? She certainly hadn’t expected him to return
from his ordeal showing kaleidoscopic flashes of eager delight amid his
weariness and worry, or to woo her with unabashed desire whenever he showed up
at her flat, or to behave as if she had limitless access to his person and his
life. Like a real partner; like it had
always been so. And somehow it had
become so. Contemplating it always stole
Elisabeth’s breath.
But she had to bring the objection;
he was waiting for it. She drew a
breath. “Wouldn’t it be a distraction
for
The beat of silence before his reply
seemed packed with meanings. “I don’t
know,” Rupert said casually. “She might
like someone to talk to—someone familiar, I mean.”
Elisabeth steeled herself, and
turned around. “Don’t you know?”
He rolled to his back and
contemplated the ceiling. Rupert evasive
was worse than a Chinese puzzle box. Of
course he knew what
As she waited, Rupert suddenly
turned his gaze back to her face. “I
can’t shut up my life in compartments anymore,” he said. “It’s—” she could see he almost said,
“killing me”— “stifling me,” he finished, after a pause. “
“I know,” she said, turning back to
her dresser and taking out her belt. “I
know.”
“I’m not a fool,” Rupert said, then
amended it to, “I’m trying not to be a fool.
I understand your misgivings.”
She had to smile at this. “I know,” she said again, softly, threading
the belt through the loops of her slacks.
“You’ll think about it?” he said,
and the wistful tone went to her heart as his importunate arguments had not.
She turned once more, dressed now as
fully as he was. “I’ll think about it,”
she promised him. “Did you see where I
put my shoes?”
*
“So what,” Elisabeth said, wrapping a newly-cleaned book carefully in tissue paper, “are you going to do with the old house, if you get this one?”
She was sitting tailor-fashion on a battered table, wrapping books and occasionally taking a pencil from behind her ear to mark an inventory list, half as often as she swiped a straggling bit of hair out of her face, which she suspected Rupert found in equal parts endearing and annoying.
“Nothing,” he said, looking up from one of the many waiting books on the table. “I imagine things will go on as they always have. The factor will take care of the house, and it’ll revert to my family after I’m gone. Unless you want it,” he added, with a faint smile. “I can change my will.”
“I’d rather you willed me something I’d want to bump you off for,” Elisabeth said, cheerfully. “Like a pristine first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Rupert said, in the same tone.
There was a silence for a long while, as Elisabeth continued to mark and wrap books.
“I never really felt like it was mine, anyway,” Rupert said unexpectedly.
“Mmm.” Elisabeth almost missed his words, absorbed as she was in the examination of a three-volume novel. By the time his meaning caught up with her, she looked up only to find that he had taken up a different book and absorbed himself in its pages.
No, she thought, you wouldn’t, would you?
But she left it unsaid.
Presently Rupert looked up from the book he was holding and surveyed the carefully-stacked piles of books waiting all around the room. “You’re going to pack all these yourself? Why not get in some help?”
Elisabeth said without looking up: “If you want something done right....”
Rupert rolled his eyes in agreement. “Then I don’t suppose you’d want me to do anything,” he said, tentatively.
“You can if you want to,” Elisabeth said. “You’re included in the ‘do it myself’ part. The inventory lists are in that pile, and the tissue paper is in that pile, and you can put together a box and stick a number on it. But—” she looked up with a little smile— “if you’d rather putter around and examine your beloved some more, my feelings won’t be hurt.”
“Oh,” Rupert sighed, idly searching one of the inventory lists for the title of the book in his hand, “I doubt I could ferret out all her secrets in one fortnight.”
As if in dry response, a small shudder of creaks passed through the house over their heads; a whistling crack of wind sounded outside the French doors of the study, and the dust motes wandering in the patch of sunlight across the room stirred a little, like bees changing course for some distant-scented orchard.
“See?” Rupert said. “She’s talking to us.” He was only half joking; Elisabeth could hear the lovestruck deeps in his voice. She looked up at the fading paint on the plaster ceiling. Centuries of smoke and dust had obscured the patterns dimly sketched in once-bright colors: their own personal Sistine Chapel, primed for restoration, a project far more ambitious than her current task of inventorying and packing a three-thousand-volume library. She understood Rupert’s enthrallment: she could see, almost from the inside—from the doorway, as it were—into his private discovery, like a child with a cigar box of treasures elevated from the ordinary, or the man in the parable who found a marvel in a field, hid it, and sold off everything to buy the field for its hidden treasure. So far Rupert had been canny enough to avoid Mr Greenbill, knowing his keenness would jack up the price.
“Don’t look so apprehensive,” Rupert said. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. It’s an old house; it settles.”
She lowered her gaze to him and smiled reassuringly. “I was just thinking maybe we could get a better bargain if we convinced Mr Greenbill the house was haunted.”
He snorted. “Don’t even joke about that. Laying a ghost is the devil and all; not worth a few pounds.” He found the book’s title on the inventory sheet and ticked it. “Did you want the box number next to the title?”
*
On the day the movers came to pick up the hundred some-odd boxes Elisabeth (and Rupert) had so carefully packed, Elisabeth herself was manically dividing her attention between the constant chirp of her new cellphone and the abstract for her thesis, the deadline of which had already been extended a week. Into all this sound and fury, Mr Greenbill descended with a real estate agent and a group of prospective buyers for the house. Rupert, who had been lurking about to make sure that the movers didn’t bump the carved wainscoting in their zeal to transfer the books to the auction house with the greatest celerity, looked as though he were tempted to take Elisabeth’s whimsical advice and start making spooky noises from the attic, when he saw them alighting from the Mercedes out front. But he saw Elisabeth give him an eloquent glance from her hiding place in the barren kitchen behind her laptop, and went instead to commandeer the Greenbill and his company, and attach himself to their tour.
Elisabeth was grateful, but she worried that Rupert’s enthusiasm for the place, even contained, would inspire the buyers to take a second look at the cracked plaster and water-stained ceilings and realize the possibilities. But she hadn’t reckoned with the power of Rupert’s class. By the time the party descended from the main stair, dodging a pair of movers in dusty coveralls as they handcarted out another three boxes, the buyers had looks of bright enthusiasm hitched forcibly onto their faces, and Mr Greenbill had discovered that Rupert was of that sort of money that views major purchases with a calm and purposeful clemency. He was practically fawning on Rupert as he saw them out the door, and even forgot to ask Elisabeth to return the house key he’d given her.
Elisabeth had time to be impressed for about ten seconds before her phone rang again.
*
That night Elisabeth lay blank and stunned on her bed while Rupert massaged peppermint moisturizer into her feet.
“You finish the abstract?” Rupert asked.
“Mmm-hmmm,” she replied, eyes closed. “That feels good. Keep doing that.”
He obliged readily. She opened her eyes after a while to see that he was smiling a small, secret smile.
“So did you actually open negotiations with the Greenbill today, or did you merely prime the hell out of him?”
The smile edged uncontrollably into a wicked smirk, confirming Elisabeth’s suspicions. “I think I’ve got him where I want him. I gave him my mobile number as they left, and he called an hour later and asked if I’d like to have lunch with him tomorrow.”
“Good….You get your house, and I get my nice fat check for my book-brokering services.”
Rupert made a noise, and she opened her eyes again. “What.”
“I’d better not tell you what he said.”
She groaned. “Oh, go ahead and tell me.”
“He said something about the, er, fortuitousness of our being partners, and vaguely mooted knocking off the price of the house in lieu of paying you.”
“What!” Elisabeth very nearly rocketed to a sitting position.
“I gave him a very icy silence and then told him that my partner was a professional, and expected full payment for her services. I, meanwhile, was prepared to pay whatever is deemed an adequate price for the house if I chose to buy it.”
Elisabeth let her head fall back again, growling. “What a dick. He doesn’t deserve that house. Or the books. Or the money.”
“I did briefly consider hinting to him that the house was cursed, just for that. But that would have involved explaining my knowledge of the supernatural. Not worth scaring the little pissant.”
Elisabeth snorted into a giggle.
“Other foot now?”
“Yes, please, love.”
*
The summer wore on, hot and unusually dry, and Elisabeth sweated under the frantically-clicking ceiling fans in her flat, making up the work she had missed during her medical leave in the spring, eyes oily, jumping at the occasional shadow, plagued now and then with the nightmares she hadn’t yet been able to shake; but the sheer weight of the work, and the novelty of Rupert’s busyness, kept her on a more or less even keel.
Rupert
meanwhile took on the process of closing on his house with far more alacrity
than he was devoting to his work with the “New World Order” as Xander jokingly
called it. He swam in blueprints and
inspectors’ reports and contracts, muttering darkly, and shed papers everywhere
he went as copiously as Elisabeth did.
At night, when neither of them was sitting up with some
One evening Brian showed up and found them each poking owlishly at their own stack of papers, and chivvied them both to the pub for dinner. He got them eating, but getting them articulate was more than Brian’s considerable talents at chivvying could encompass. “Hasn’t this country heard of air conditioning?” was all Elisabeth could mutter, after demolishing half a basket of fish and chips. Rupert’s response was a monosyllabic growl that Brian thought he could possibly interpret as, “Like your country can talk.”
“Have to look into new ceiling fans,” she grunted at Brian, picking up another bit of fish. “Mine are fixing to racket themselves right off the ceiling.”
Rupert surfaced into the land of the verbal. “Yes, nothing makes for a romantic interlude like worrying the bloody fan’s going to crash down on your heads. A tenderer nothing has never been whispered in my ear, I don’t think.”
Brian glanced in horror at Elisabeth, prepared to see her responding in wounded offense, but instead her face twisted into a pained laugh, and she leaned her forehead on the back of her hand, snickering at Rupert. “Oh, God, that was such a fiasco.”
“It was,” he agreed, dabbing with his napkin at his grin.
“D’you think it’s any cooler in College?” Elisabeth asked Brian.
Brian stifled a disbelieving laugh. “Are you seriously proposing taking rooms in College so you and Rupert can get your conjugal due?”
“Conjugal due, my arse,” Rupert said, and at the same time Elisabeth responded, “Forget conjugal dues, I need some sleep.”
“Then no,” Brian said. “It wouldn’t be any better in College. It’s better at my place—I bought a window-box A/C last year—but if you think I’m inviting the pair of you to bunk at my flat—”
Elisabeth and Rupert snorted as one.
*
Neither of them was expecting disaster when Rupert asked her point-blank, as they were taking tea in the kitchen the next afternoon, if she had come to the end of her knowledge.
Elisabeth thought about it calmly, and decided that the little knowledge remaining to her was no danger to anyone. “Well, I only saw the first episode of the next season of Angel before I skipped dimensions. I was traveling a lot at the time, you know, and didn’t have consistent access to a TV—”
But Rupert interrupted. “I beg your pardon. I thought you said the program was called ‘Buffy.’”
Elisabeth
blinked at him. “It was. Angel got a spinoff when he went to
He squinted hard at her. “Angel has his own show?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t know this. I told Xander back in Sunnydale; I thought it’d have got around to everybody and their dog by now.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
He huffed and rolled his eyes. “Oh very well. What happened in the last episode of Angel that you saw? God, this is so befuddling.” He shaded his eyes with one weary hand.
“Well, it’s all gotten very fuzzy, but the salient point was that somebody sent the amulet to Angel at Wolfram & Hart and he dropped it and Spike came out of it. So Spike’s on Angel’s show now.”
For a moment Rupert just stared at her. She waited until he spoke, absorbing it. “Somebody sent the amulet to Angel. He dropped it, and Spike came out. Was it destroyed?”
Elisabeth thought about this. “I don’t think so. I think it just fell out of the envelope onto the office floor.”
“Which brings me to my next question. What has Wolfram & Hart to do with it?”
She
frowned at him. “Well, you know. The Senior Partners gave Angel and his crew
the
“No,” Rupert said, “I don’t know. All I know is that the amulet came from a dubious place. Are you telling me it came from Wolfram & Hart?”
“Well, yes. Devil’s bargain and all that. Don’t look like that,” Elisabeth said. “It was the only way to…well….” She stopped, thinking hard. “There was a very good reason why he accepted. But—for some reason I can’t remember what it is. That’s strange. I’m totally blanking on this. I remember it involved some alteration of reality….” She stopped again, eyes unfocused, but the events of Angel’s story had completely dissolved into a matte blur. “An alteration of reality,” she repeated, softly. “Damn.”
It was then that she realized that Rupert was no longer in the kitchen with her. Distantly, her bedroom door shut with a sharp snap, saved from a slam at the last minute, she could tell by the sound. She waited, frozen, for the sound she knew she would hear next: Rupert’s voice on the phone to Buffy. But when at last she did hear it, she was no less dismayed than she would have been had it been a surprise. He wasn’t shouting; he wasn’t bothering to speak quietly. He was speaking with an emotionless rage that turned Elisabeth’s blood hot and then cold. She tried very hard not to hear any of the words, but some of them bled through the horrid silence anyway, and she forced herself to move over to the sink and begin to wash their teacups, to drown them out.
What could you mean by…making a fool of me…trust him but you don’t trust…absolute travesty….
And then, words that rose above even the pitch of the running water: “We had a bargain!”
Elisabeth shook so that she dropped the teacup she was washing in the sink. It didn’t break, though she picked it up and felt it all over for hairline cracks.
“I don’t think it’s comparable,” Rupert said coldly as she turned off the water. There was a long silence, then, “I don’t give two shits about Spike, can’t you get that through your head? It’s you.”
“Oh, Rupert, Rupert,” Elisabeth whispered to the teacups, beaded with water in the drainer.
He said: “How long were you going to wait before telling me? Just tell me that.”
Elisabeth shut her eyes tight.
He said, enunciating: “There was nothing she could do. What was the point in—? Oh, balls. What about that bloody amulet, eh? What about that great bloody barracks of an evil law firm that could wipe us all out with the stroke of a pen?…Oh, the Council, my arse. For all their compromises they never got into bed with a houseful of evil lawyers….Well, fuck,” he said, anticlimactically, and Elisabeth knew that Buffy must have hung up on him.
There was a very long and dreadful silence throughout the flat. Elisabeth trembled and tasted bile at the back of her tongue.
Presently she heard him get up and open the door, and his footsteps sounded inexorably in the corridor, coming her way. She held onto the counter to steady herself, and fixed her gaze on the wall.
He was in the doorway, and it was too late to caution him to think twice about attacking Buffy, too late to warn him that he could so easily expose himself to hurts he couldn’t bear. Too late to be angry with him for being such a fool.
His gaze was upon her, still trembling at the counter. She heard him give a great sigh.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
Of course it wasn’t her fault, but now she was plainly exposed to miseries that were coming for her, coming for them both, and wasn’t that as bitter as real shame?
“You didn’t know I didn’t know,” he said.
“No,” she breathed.
“You thought it was safe. I thought it was safe,” he added in a mutter.
What on earth was wrong with him, stating the obvious like this? She turned around to face him.
“It’s merely academic,” she said quietly, “whether I’m Pandora or the box.” She watched the shot go home, and then said: “I need to go and take a walk.”
He said nothing as she edged past him, shrugged into her windbreaker, and stepped out into the sultry afternoon light.
*
They should have been able to work it off in some burst of meaningless quarrelling, or some hideous spasm of black humor, or any of the numberless rituals of everyday living they had developed—one washing dishes and the other drying; or one gathering scattered books and the other sorting them—but somehow it didn’t happen. They ate dinner. They did the washing up. They did some work. They went to bed, with the bathroom light shining out into the hall outside the bedroom.
Elisabeth lay with her back to him, trying to curb her spasmodic shivering, but before she had reached control, Rupert said, in a soft whisper: “Please, Elisabeth…don’t make yourself ill. It’s not your fault.”
If he had spoken with less compassion, perhaps Elisabeth would merely have been stung; but she reacted to his concern as if it were condescension, and she actually responded.
“No,” she said, going still at last. “It’s yours.”
She waited for him to react; waited to feel him go rigid in the bed, to return fire, to defend himself. But all he did was give a little sigh and turn over. And they were quiet.
Elisabeth slept; and in the small hours her nightmare wrapped her again in its suffocating fug. How boringly predictable, she thought before the scene took over her mind again: Rupert pinning her, sneering at her, and her mirror image drawing her soul out to itself; the hatred generated in every cell of her body for her own pitiful cries, the total sense of abandonment by both good and evil; she was alone, and nothing, and Rupert could not love her—
She fought her way out of the dream, kicking and whimpering, but Rupert clung to her, gripping one struggling arm and holding her down. A cry broke from her throat.
“Elisabeth. Elisabeth! It’s me. You’re only dreaming again. That’s all it is. You’re home, and safe. You’re only dreaming.”
Oh, how she hated this moment in particular: the moment his words became pregnant not with threat but urgent comfort. It never failed to bring her gorge up in revulsion at herself. “You can’t save me,” she muttered, as the dream-fug began to clear from her consciousness.
“You don’t need saving, love,” he said in the darkness, and she began, pitifully, to cry. Struggling free of his arm, she sat up in bed, swallowing gorge and tears together. But it wasn’t going down, it was coming up instead, and with a snort of frustration she lurched out of bed and to the bathroom, to heave for the few minutes it would take her body to calm itself.
When it was finished, she washed her clammy face and her hands, patted them slowly dry with the handtowel, and trudged back to bed.
Rupert said nothing as she straightened the covers and climbed back in, but she knew he was awake. She too was awake now, and she remembered that she had gone to sleep angry with him. “That was just too predictable,” she muttered, reaching for a tissue to blow her nose.
“They don’t seem to be going away,” he said quietly. “The dreams, I mean.”
Elisabeth lay down, biting her tongue to stop the sarcastic inquiry whether she was neglecting to do something about her dreams. She was, after all. “I’m okay,” she answered him, settling in under the covers. The drowsy counterreaction was stealing over her, and she wanted nothing more than to give in to it.
He sighed audibly, and settled down himself, turning over so that his back was to her in the darkness.
Before she could stop herself, and before he could fall asleep, she blurted: “Do you love me?”
She heard him move, turning his head as if to look back over his shoulder. There was a pause; then: “Yes.”
Elisabeth sighed, and after a long, uneasy silence, they were both asleep once more.
*
Rupert and Buffy didn’t exactly make up: they sniped at each other in group emails for a few days and then got tired of maintaining the posture; and so this conflict, like so many others before it, quietly salted the ground of their relationship, and nothing was said or done to stop it. Elisabeth saw the emails, and heard the brief, cold telephone exchanges a room away; but she said nothing to Rupert, and he treated her with a faint distance as well.
It was because of the proliferating conflict that Rupert neglected to give her the details of his negotiations with the Greenbill for the house. All Elisabeth knew was that he muttered more than usual, left stacks of papers about, and plowed his hand through his hair more often. In a more seasonable time, Elisabeth would have laughed at him, smoothed his hair, kissed him, and invited him to tell her all about it; but now she merely shot him furtive glances from over her books, and he gave her long looks that were not quite glares.
The summer air grew closer and thicker; rain was imminent, they said, but it never came. Elisabeth could feel Rupert’s frustration permeating the flat likewise, and so she felt a relief totally incongruous with the pressure of weather and work when he appeared at her desk that evening and set a cup of tea at her elbow. She looked askance at it for only a second; he went away without a word, and she decided to drink the tea. His relief when he reentered the room and saw her sipping at it was palpable.
But it did not cure his isolation. Elisabeth worked and drank her tea; and felt Rupert descending into paralysis on the other side of the room. She was just making up her mind to stop work to talk to him when she heard him slap shut the folder at his place at the dining table. Three books followed, thumping one by one into an impatient stack.
Elisabeth twisted around in her chair in time to see him standing up, a closed look on his face. “I’m going out,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her, and it seemed to Elisabeth that he almost wasn’t really talking to her, either.
She didn’t even open her mouth to protest; and it never occurred to her to ask where he was going. She merely watched him put on a windbreaker (utterly useless in the sultry weather, but force of habit ruled, as she well knew), check his pockets briefly, and disappear. The door clicked softly shut behind him.
Elisabeth went back to work.
Without Rupert in the house, the words came much more easily and in an unfettered surge. She finished the analysis of one book, tossed it onto the discard pile on the floor (invariably any book added to this pile caused the whole thing to topple and require straightening later, but nobody cared), and took up the next.
She didn’t realize how much time had passed until she sat up to stretch her arms and take a sip of the tea Rupert had made her, and found it cold and rancid. She looked inside the cup, then at the clock. Rupert had certainly been gone a while.
Well, this was nothing out of the way. She resisted the urge to worry, and got back to work.
An hour later she gave up attempting to concentrate on the new section she was writing and got up to dump out the tea mug. She began to contemplate seriously what she might do if Rupert didn’t come home soon. As she washed the mug, she noticed at last that he had made no attempt to make tea for himself: all the dishes and cups were put away, and after making her cup he had washed out the kettle and put it in the drainer. Had he planned it this way? she wondered suddenly. Made her a cup of tea, gauged her pliability, salved his conscience, and then….
She brushed that thought aside as selfish. After all, it was a free country and Rupert Giles was a big boy. She wasn’t going to worry about him.
Much.
No, she was going to go to bed, as a matter of fact, and sleep soundly, and…hopefully wake up next to him in the morning.
The going to bed part she managed okay. But she realized, once all the lights in the flat (except the bathroom light) were out and the doors locked and the windows cracked at just the right width to tempt in the night air, that it had been a very long time indeed since she had gone to bed alone.
The cat leapt up on the bed and came unerringly to find a comfortable spot near her head to hunker down. She reached out automatically and stroked his head, over and over. “What d’you think I should do?” The cat gave a small purr and pushed its whiskers against her hand, one side and then the other. “Should I go looking for him? No, too obvious. Should I call one of the Scoobies?” She sighed. “That would make him mad. But what if he gets himself into trouble? What if I wake up next to a Fyarl demon? Don’t laugh! It’s not outside the realm of possibility.” She flopped onto her back, and the cat moved to curl up propped against her side. “I’m trying not to worry about him,” she said, stroking the cat absently. “If he’s not back by morning I’m calling out the dogs. Of course, if he does get himself into trouble there’s almost no point in my looking for him in the morning; that’s way too late. I’ll give him two more hours. Then I’ll…I’ll call Xander. Xander will know what to do. Thanks,” she mumbled. “I’m glad we had this talk.”
With the cat at her side, Elisabeth dozed and jerked awake, off and on, as the night deepened. Outside she could hear the quiet of the city sleeping; every now and then a car rumbled past, and she waited to hear if the car would stop and deposit a passenger at her front door. But it never did. She watched the luminous numbers of her digital alarm. One more hour, and I’ll call…Fifteen minutes; no, I’ll give him one more hour….
One more hour….
To Elisabeth’s overwhelming relief, within the allotted hour her strained hearing picked up the soft scrape of footsteps at her front door. Keys jangled in the lock, a protracted noise that confirmed Rupert’s expected state; finally the door cracked open and the footsteps shuffled inside. The door shut, a little more firmly than planned, perhaps, but the movements that followed had the same sound of gentle vagueness as before. There was a silence, followed by some bumping about, and at last Rupert’s shadow crossed the light that fell into the corridor from the bathroom. She squinted against the glare: his outline didn’t look demony, so she lay back and waited with her eyes half shut. The cat got up, arched, stretching, and plopped off the bed; he didn’t appear upset, so Elisabeth relaxed. The cat did, however, decide it would be funny to get under his human’s feet; Rupert stumbled, put down a hand on the foot of the bed, and muttered an oath.
Still muttering about damn cats, he sat down on his side of the bed to undress. Elisabeth heard his boots thump to the floor one by one, followed by the thin flump of his jumper and the less soft sounds of his jeans. He murmured something else unintelligible and fumbled down the covers on his side of the bed before slumping down.
It took some squirming and a little bumping against her before he settled down lumpishly to sleep. She could smell the smoke in his hair, and the particular quality of his scent told her exactly which pub he had been to. Elisabeth filed away this bit of information, in case she should need it on another occasion.
She turned over, and unhappily followed her partner to sleep.
*
The alarm woke Elisabeth early the next day, and she nearly turned over and slapped it off. But her work wouldn’t wait, so she struggled up and out of the bed, pulling on her bathrobe before she could change her mind about getting up.
She turned, heart beating hard against morning vertigo and fear, to see if Rupert were…normal. He was: he was breathing slow and heavily through his nose, his hair was a wreck and needed washing, and she could hardly ignore his scent. But he wasn’t a demon, and he appeared to be in good health, so she drew a steadier breath and went to hit the shower.
Under the spray her mind came awake, laying out the day’s work, plotting personal deadlines for this and that accomplishment. God, but she was tired. For a moment she wondered if she were ever going to be able to live without this constant struggle to bring herself to the task, even and sometimes especially the tasks she loved. But she decided this was a fruitless train of thought, and erased it as best she could by turning up the heat on the water and letting the spray beat the cold depression out of her chest.
Rupert was up when she emerged: he was not in the bedroom, and she could hear and smell coffee brewing. She dressed, a quirky amalgam of black skirt, heavy boots, and light cotton blouse, comfortable but dignified enough for public appearance; since her illness she had taken to dressing more professionally, as if to prove to the world that she viewed finishing her degree as serious work.
She felt near tears. This was not a good beginning.
In the kitchen Rupert stood hunched over the counter, popping open a bottle of aspirin one-handed. A glass of water and a full cup of coffee awaited his attentions. Elisabeth moved delicately around him (he did smell quite ripe, she thought with a mixture of resentment and pity), plucked a go-cup from the cabinet at his side, and filled it with coffee. “Lots to do today,” she said, as she filled the cup and added milk and sugar.
Rupert grunted: more response than she’d hoped for, actually.
“Probably won’t be home for dinner,” she said. “You should forage.”
He gave another grunt that bordered on a groan. Probably, she thought, it was the mention of food. Well, tough.
Elisabeth, to her own exasperation, was beginning to feel a grovelling sort of compassion for him, as if by giving him every benefit of every doubt she could reinstate him forcibly on his feet, as if her own compassion might singlehandedly prevent him from ever slipping into paralysis and escapism again. She hated being this sort of person, and she hated the other sort of person she wanted to be, which was the resentful one who sniped at him and punished him. The only thing to do, obviously, was flee.
She packed up her satchel and beat a hasty retreat, without bidding Rupert goodbye.
*
The day’s work went poorly, but Elisabeth plugged away heroically, switching between reading and writing when either got to be too much. At lunchtime she ducked out of College and bought a sandwich, which she took away to a quiet spot and ate. The wind kicked up the branches of trees overhead, and she drew up her knees on the bench and tucked her skirt awkwardly around her ankles.
Back at her work table, she found that the writing and notetaking she had left waiting had grown utterly opaque and impossible to break into again. She sat down wearily and propped her forehead on the heel of her hand, blowing out her cheeks in a long sigh. She couldn’t take this home; she’d get even less done, especially with Rupert in his current state—whether paralyzed over his own work, or out quietly carousing to his own misfortune. Perhaps she could get a room for the night in College, go home quietly, pack a bag, explain to Rupert—
Was this how it happened? Was this how people who loved each other fell apart from one another?
To her dismay, she found bitter, stinging tears gathering full and sliding down her face. Quietly, so that no one should see, she wiped her fingers under her glass-rims and got up to find the restroom, where she could cry quietly in private.
Crying is all well and good, she quoted to herself as she finished, but afterwards you still have to figure out what to do. “Oh, this is so stupid,” she said out loud. What was stopping her from calling Rupert and asking for a council of two on the matter? I’m feeling dreadful, she anticipated saying, and I’m thinking of staying here a night to finish my work. But, she continued, washing her face at the sink, I don’t want to be apart from you if you’re—no, if I’m—no—if it’s a bad time. What are you thinking?
She dried her face with paper towels, settled her glasses back on her nose (crookedly; every pair of glasses she owned wound up sitting crooked on her face), and went out to the quad with her new cell-phone. The promised rain was on its way: grey clouds were blowing in, and there was a fresh coolness to the air that seemed to make everyone she saw breathe easier as they went about their business.
He answered his mobile number on the third ring. “Rupert,” she began, drawing a deep breath.
“Elisabeth, I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t talk right now.”
“Huh?” She blinked.
But he was going on, without a pause, brisk and arid-voiced, as if he’d never had a hangover in his life. “It’s a bad time. Can I call you back? I’ll call you back.”
“But—”
“Unless,” he changed tracks suddenly, “you’ve got something of an—er—unusual nature to report?”
She had no idea what he meant until it occurred to her, a second later, that he might be in the company of someone in front of whom he could not speak freely. “No,” she said, feebly.
“Right. Fine. Talk to you later. Yes. Bye.” Click.
Elisabeth took the little phone away from her ear and stared at it. “All-righty then,” she said, with sarcastic cheer, and snapped the phone shut.
“So much for worrying about him,” she muttered as she stalked back up to her work table.
The pique, however, cleared her brain somewhat, enabling her to get back to work. By the time she had written a whole paragraph she had also rearranged her plans. She would stay here in the common room as long as necessary, then get a taxi home at whatever hour she happened to be finished. And Rupert could go hang.
This was enough to carry her through the rest of the afternoon. The sky darkened outside the windows, and in good time the rain began to spatter pleasantly against the glass. As Elisabeth worked, the skies opened, so that by the time evening arrived, she looked up to find that she was alone and all the outside sounds had been muted by the wet. She drew a long, long breath and let it out. She felt hungry, and wondered if perhaps she should knock off work, at least to eat.
A familiar footstep sounded outside the door, and she turned to see Rupert in the doorway, a furled umbrella in his hand pointing loosely at the floor. Instead of the jeans and duster she would have expected, he was dressed in slacks and a black oxford shirt open at the neck. What arrested her attention, however, was not his sartorial excellence but his buoyant air of radiant pleasure. His mouth was calm, but his eyes were bright. As she watched, he reached into his pocket and drew out a tarnished brass key.
“Rupert….” she said slowly.
The grin spread from his eyes to his lips. He twirled the key in his fingers, watching her begin to smile in answer.
“Do you mean…?”
“Last paper signed today,” he said quietly.
Elisabeth began to grin.
“She’s all ours,” Rupert said.
For several moments they were silent, grinning widely at each other.
“Can you spare some time this evening?”
Her spirits suddenly rose to an answering lightness. She reached to the table and flipped her book shut with a flourish.
*
Out on the street, he took her heavy satchel from her and unfurled the umbrella in two smooth, happy motions. “I’ve packed us a picnic,” he said. “Hungry?”
“Ravenous,” she said, and at the sideward slant of his happy glance toward her, she reached impulsively for his hand and kissed it. “God,” she said, “I’m so happy it rained.”
He
laughed aloud. “In
“Isn’t it, though?”
He handed her gallantly into his car, and they shot little grins at each other the whole of the now-familiar drive to Pyke’s Lea. The house, dripping in the wet twilight, looked both peaceful and lonely, and more appealing than Elisabeth had ever seen it.
He popped open the boot to reveal a pile of blankets, a wicker picnic basket with the neck of a bottle of wine protruding from under the lid, a paper sack heavy with groceries, and a small, battered boombox. She helped him gather the accoutrements, and they crunched over the gravel of the drive to the brick front walk.
It seemed that the house even had a different scent once it was their own. The door opened onto the lonely empty foyer, and Rupert fumbled for light switches. As they moved further into the house they brought their carnival air with them, so that soon every available light was burning and Elisabeth and Rupert were laughing heartily at nothing in particular.
“Where do you want the blankets?” Elisabeth said, her voice half-muffled in the pile.
“In the study,” he said. “I thought we’d eat there.”
“Right you are.” The study was easily the most beautiful and inviting room in the house; clearly the builder of Pyke’s Lea had loved books, for the original shelving stretched high toward the painted ceiling. That’s a lot of books for that time period, she mused.
“I’d light a fire,” Rupert said, gesturing at the grand fireplace with its ancient mirror paneling above the mantel, “but I’ve no idea when the chimneys were swept last.”
They put down their burdens and began to arrange them a little; but after a moment Rupert straightened to see Elisabeth standing, smiling softly at him.
“So,” she said. “Do I get a tour?”
He crossed the room to her, took her hand, and brought it to his lips. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. Their eyes met, and they both smiled.
*
“I’m sorry about the phone call, you know,” he said, as he took her up the stairs. Their feet made a pleasant heavy sound on the seasoned wood.
“What phone call? Oh, yeah,” she said, remembering. “I don’t think it’s important anymore. Were you closing the deal?”
“Mm-hmm. If you go this way, I’ll show you what I want to do with this corner room.”
He led her about, his hand twined with hers, and told her at last his dreams in detail. Their footsteps echoed from room to room, and she found herself adding to his ideas: “And if we plastered that, we could paint it the same white as the….” “Once this floor’s sanded it should be beautiful all on its own.” At last they made their way round to the last room on that floor. “This,” he said, resting his chin on her hair from behind, “is the master bedroom. What do you think—a pale green, perhaps?”
“Or a very soft periwinkle,” she added softly. The last of the rain-washed gloaming was shining in through the windows, and Rupert behind her was both dark shadow and warm substance. It occurred to her suddenly that in all the heat and work and bother, she had missed him terribly. He kissed her hair, and she tightened her hold on his hand, her skin glowing warm under her clothing.
“Shall we?” he murmured.
She turned to him, holding in a grin. “Shall we what?”
“Eat,” he said, as if there could be no other answer; but his eyes twinkled in the half-darkness. “There’s a whole picnic downstairs waiting to be demolished.”
*
They ate, couched comfortably on the blankets he had packed: chicken salad sandwiches and pickles of all sorts and three cheeses and still-faintly-warm French bread, and red wine and lemonade and olives. When they were on their third glass of wine apiece, he drew out the pièce de résistance: two very small ramekins filled with—
“Oh, good heavens, is this crème brulée?”
His grin had gone louche with the wine and their relaxed mutual company. Delighted, she took the spoon he handed her and cracked the surface of her custard. At the first bite she rolled her eyes to the mysterious frescos and sucked the spoon with a little moan. He dug into his own custard and gave her a hooded glance.
“I’m not so full I can’t finish this,” she said; and she did finish it, with him laughing at her in delight.
“Care to dance?” he asked her, getting up and going over to plug in the boombox. He pressed a button, and a cassette tape scratched to life: slow, sensuous jazz that instantly brought her eyes up to his. She took his outstretched hand and got to her feet.
“I’m not very good at dancing, you know.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” he said softly, with a wicked glance. “And there’s nothing a little fresh experience can’t cure.”
She found herself instantly in his arms, her hands curving up over his strong shoulders, his drawing her close from behind, their faces close, his soft eyelashes cast low. Warmth grew between them, and his hands moved to guide hers into position. And they began to dance, as if they had been doing it for years and knew one another’s moves from old.
She stumbled once, and they giggled, recouped their balance, and twirled like youths. Her skin tingled. It was going to be tonight. Her blood was singing the certainty back to her. It was going to be tonight.
With a small snap every light in the house went out, and the music cut off with a wilting wrench.
They whirled to a sudden stop in the blackness. Elisabeth clutched at him convulsively, and caught her breath in a sob, too startled to cry out.
There was a long, terrible silence. Then:
“Damn,” Rupert said succinctly. “Must’ve blown a fuse.”
She wanted to ask him what made him think that, but didn’t trust her voice.
“I’ll go find the fuse box. Have you a torch by any chance?”
He moved a step, but she clung to him. His hands moved to steady them both. “Elisabeth….”
“Wherever you’re going, I’m coming too,” she breathed.
He paused, and then answered calmly: “Probably a good idea. What about that torch?”
“Sorry,” she murmured, sliding behind him and slipping her hand into the waistband of his slacks.
“Ah well.”
“Do you even know where the fuse box is?” she hissed, trying to concentrate on the sound of their voices and not on the horrible way the darkness was pressing upon her vision like a suffocating black washcloth, or on the terrible possibility that the darkness was now hiding the fact that they were not alone. “Rupert?” Against her efforts her voice betrayed her.
“Yes,” he said, “I know where the fuse box is. It’s out in the corridor by the kitchen. Not far at all. We’ll have the lights back on in two ticks. Don’t worry.”
She knew then that it had occurred to him that darkness more than anything else plucked at her weaknesses. I won’t panic, she told herself, and shut her eyes, hoping that a darkness of her own making would be less frightening than the utter darkness of the house around them.
They moved slowly, shuffling together; but her attempts to stay as close to him as possible hampered their movement. She could feel him stifling his impatience, and in silence they continued to feel their way across the study to the door.
The wind kicked up again, shaking drops of rain from the nearby trees to the ground; amidst this patter the house shuffled off a few wooden cracks over their heads. Elisabeth’s breath lanced into her throat in a voiceless scream, and she stopped and clung hard to him.
“Elisabeth, for heaven’s sake,” Rupert said.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back on a sob. “I can’t help it.”
She felt him draw a breath, reassuming his patience. She swallowed hard and took up her courage to follow him as he moved again.
There was a soft series of cracks that echoed its way toward them; not footsteps, and not even definitely inside the house, but low, almost beneath them.
He stopped too; and Elisabeth’s breath ended in her throat.
They waited, but nothing came for them; and they moved on, the sounds of their own footsteps multiplied in whispers across ancient rug and floorboard.
It seemed to take forever for them to reach the wall of the corridor. Elisabeth followed him, listening to the sound of his hand slithering along the plaster, seeking, feeling, questing.
A small clack close at hand, and Elisabeth jumped. “Found it,” he murmured, and latched the small metal door open. Mr Greenbill senior had apparently had the good sense to keep an old torch inside the box, for Rupert’s fumbling hands knocked it about, grasped it, and clicked it on. An egg-yolk weak light flared in her vision.
“What is it?” she asked, as he trained the light on the dusty column of fuses.
“Main fuse is all right,” he grunted. The beam played slowly down the fuses one by one. “Actually, they’re all good.” His voice, Elisabeth thought, carried mostly mild puzzlement, tinged with the skepticism born of a twenty-five-year Watcher’s career. Her hand was growing clammy tucked in his waistband, so she pulled it out to wipe it on her skirt.
“Any extra fuses?” she asked, forcing herself to be calm.
“No. Whatever’s the problem, we won’t solve it tonight.”
“Then….”
“I think,” he said with a sigh, “we’d better go home.”
Home. The small word echoed sadly in Elisabeth’s mind. In a few short hours she had begun to feel that this might be her home.
“All right?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, and found to her surprise that it was true. She was still badly frightened, but the darkness had forced her senses to reach out past the immediate confines of her body, and she was beginning to trust their stunted acuity.
He clicked off the torch and replaced it in the fuse box. Elisabeth heard the door latch shut. “Door’s this way,” he said, and took her arm gently, nudging her in the direction he wanted.
After shuffling interminably along, Elisabeth brought her hand up instinctively to meet the heavy aged oak of the door, smooth and cool to the touch. “Ah,” Rupert said. He nudged her gently aside and felt for the handle. “Funny,” he said, “I don’t remember locking it. Ah well.” He snicked the lock undone, and she felt him grip the handle and pull.
Nothing happened.
“Is it stuck?” she quavered, fighting down a fresh sense of suffocation.
“A bit,” he said. She felt him edge her further aside with his shoulder so as to take the handle with both hands. He grunted. “No joy,” he said. “Give me a hand.”
Her hands took a place with his on the cool iron handle, and she braced a foot against the bottom of the wainscot framing the door.
“Three…two…one.” They pulled. Elisabeth felt a terrific resistance, as of a great vacuum, holding the door shut, and oddly, rather than succumbing to fresh fear, she felt a cool urge to outdo this unaccountable force. She braced her foot hard, and pulled afresh: and all at once the door sucked open on a gout of wind, and she almost fell. Rupert grasped her roughly and drew her out across the threshold, as if against great pressure, and they stumbled out and down the steps and into the weed-grown flowerbeds of the front garden. Behind them the door banged hard against the wall, and boomeranged, and clacked home. As it shut, the wind died again, leaving only the patter of leftover raindrops falling from the trees.
“Well!” Elisabeth said, echoing Coleridge, with far more humor than that poor Romantic had employed in his dejected ode. “That’s a very strange wind-tunnel.”
Rupert merely grunted. “Let’s hope I have my car keys. I don’t fancy doing all that over again.”
Fortunately, he did. The car started without mishap, and as they pulled out of the lane onto the road, Elisabeth looked back at the house. It looked no less sympathetic than before, but it seemed very dark. She was glad to be going away for the night.
*
Back at the flat, they turned on lights and Elisabeth set down her satchel so she could go into the kitchen. “Want some tea?”
“Yes, please.”
The cat came running to meet them, and spent several minutes sniffing at their shoes and whatever it could reach of their clothing before rubbing against their legs and purring. Rupert bent and scratched his ears affectionately; he seemed to have forgotten completely cursing the cat the night before. “We’re glad to see you, too,” Elisabeth said, amused.
Later, over their tea, Rupert looked at her wryly. “I’m very sorry. This is not the ending I had envisioned for the evening.”
“Our life,” Elisabeth agreed, “definitely has donkey’s ears. But don’t worry,” she added with a little smile. “We’ll get there eventually.”
His face warmed visibly, and he opened his mouth, but the cat interrupted with a loud cry from over his empty food bowl.
They both laughed.
*
They went to bed: bumping around each other to brush their teeth in the bathroom, undressing and hanging clothes in the bulging closet, opening the windows to catch the fresh breeze following the rain. Elisabeth opted to have all the lights out for once. Rupert said, when she returned to the dark bedroom: “I know this will sound condescending, but I realize you were very brave back at the house.”
“I’d forgotten some of the graces of darkness,” was all she answered. But when they crawled into bed together, Elisabeth found his hand once more and kissed it. When she let go, he used it to stroke the contour of her cheek, and as they settled down, it moved to her shoulder, and the backs of his fingers traced upward to the soft underside of her forearm, caressing.
At her tacit invitation he rose in the bed and bent over her, to kiss her mouth: and she kissed him back. “I’m,” he murmured, “terribly…sorry….”
“Shh,” she said. “Me too.”
He drew a long breath, and they sighed together, settling in for a long, thorough kiss.
But after a moment Elisabeth found that kissing him wasn’t precisely the touch she wanted. In the darkness she broke the kiss and held his face in her hands. He made a movement as if to protest, or to query; she murmured, “Shh…,” and began to explore his face with patient fingertips.
“The graces of darkness?” he murmured. She answered by finding his soft eyelid and closing it. The aged skin slipped under her touch, loose but still elastic; his eyelashes were long and soft like a child’s, his crow’s feet permanent and joyful, his eyebrow coarse and gently bushed. With slow hands she explored the creases of his brow and the beginnings of a soft wattle under his chin and the strength of his jawline and the smooth mobility of his lips, the chiseled definition of chin, philtrum, and nostril. His lips opened under her hand to draw a breath, and when her palm moved to conform to his proud cheekbone, it slipped on a smooth wet place. She drew in a sharp breath.
They were still a moment; then silently she moved both hands in the darkness to cup his face for a moment before moving beneath him to turn them over.
Now he lay on his back, and she stroked her hands down to his shoulders and dipped to taste the planes of his chest, touching now with sensitive lips rather than fingers. In the grace of darkness she found coarse male hair; a tight, hard nipple (she paused to smile); old scars; soft belly; moving down and down.
Her hand pushed down the covers over his thighs, and found him already naked. She stroked his thigh, a movement of preparation for the thing she was going to do next: it had not been her original plan, but it seemed right, and she bent to prime him with a kiss to the hollow of his hip, saving the last, perfect contact for an exquisitely prolonged moment. A hard shiver went all the way through him, and he warmed under her touch.
At the appointed time he gave voice to a strong, extended moan, perfect in its helplessness, and she cradled his hips and set about to make him do it again. On other, previous, occasions, his unwonted loudness during this particular act of their repertoire had startled and consequently slightly annoyed her; but now, in the darkness that had faded to accommodate the faint streetlight beyond the bedroom curtains, she closed her eyes and redoubled her efforts, without any more reserve.
When at last it was finished, she lay her head on his belly and recovered her equilibrium, swallowing hard. His hand wandered down and buried itself in her hair, stroking her scalp gratefully. She suddenly felt turned inside out with what could only be love for him: she raised her head, and at his silent invitation, squirmed upward to curl against him, with her face pressed safely under the lee of his jaw.
His hand, meanwhile, wandered down her body, seeking to reciprocate; but she intercepted it with one of hers and clasped it upon the broad curve of his chest, which rose and fell with his breathing. He freed himself gently, and began to explore the contours of her hand as she had done with his face. Slowly: slowly, his fingertips, large and ineffably male compared to hers but equally sensitive, traced her small nail-beds, the tag of skin that was going to be a sharp hangnail next her thumb, the wrinkles of each knuckle one by one, the down of hair and the softly raised veins on the back.
The slow warmth she had gathered to herself while ministering to him flared blazing to life, and her breath quickened, then quickened again when he turned her hand over to find his way to its soft underside. His touch brushed the creases of her wrist, the line of her thumb, the soft puffs of flesh under each finger; and then, with the same inerrancy she had used to him, his own thumb pressed gently into the heart of her palm.
She jerked, tingling, and lost her breath completely. As he stroked her palm over and over, the power swept slowly through her and expired in a soft, shuddering moan; and she was left limp in his embrace.
She recovered enough to lift her head and kiss his bare shoulder, before subsiding to rest against him, and drift toward sleep in the rain-cooled air.
“What a day it’s been,” she murmured, eyes closed.
He hummed an inarticulate agreement, and they both relaxed at last.
*
In the morning Rupert rose and dressed early. He tried not to wake Elisabeth, and was so far fortunate that she merely murmured and turned over, her long limp hair drifting over her face. He smoothed it out of the way, whispered to her lightly-sleeping face, “I’ll be back later,” and let himself quietly out of the flat.
The rain had returned during the night, but now the sky was clearing again, leaving the pavements glittering wet and every outdoor surface washed and beaded with water. He kept his pace quick but measured, and paused only for traffic.
The city was already awake, bells chiming, people dodging here and there, voices rising in greeting or hawking or irritation at the traffic. Rupert kept moving, and his steady pace brought him very quickly to his destination.
He glanced across the street at the vicarage, decided it was late enough, and went ahead into the church. The receptionist glanced up. “Ah, Mr. Giles,” she said. “Good morning to you. A relief to have the rain, eh?”
“Indeed,” Rupert said politely. “Is the vicar in?”
“Oh, yes, oh yes. Go on up.”
Rupert went up. At the open door to the vicar’s office, he paused to knock at the doorframe.
Anne Langland turned and saw him. “Rupert. An unexpected pleasure. I hope you are well.” She moved from the small table where she had been making herself tea, and added more water to the electric kettle, with the same air of unruffled professionalism that had marked his admiration for a few select Watchers, and of course, in her best moments, for Buffy.
As the water heated she turned to him again, with her head cocked in that unthreatening shrewd gaze he had learned to trust, though it never did make him comfortable. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “What has happened? Were you unable to purchase the house?”
He brightened a very little. “No,” he said. “I signed the last paper yesterday. It’s officially mine now. I took Elisabeth to see it last night.”
“Then is it as you feared? Does she not share your enthusiasm for the place?”
“No,” he said sadly. “No, I’m not worried about that anymore. She’s tired and stressed; it’s nothing to do with the house. I think she really loves it.”
A faint pursed line of humor came into Mother Anne’s smile. “Then whatever it is, for heaven’s sake sit down and take your tea. If it’s not Elisabeth, and it’s not the house, then it must be something new, and we have a bit of a conversation ahead of us.” Sheepishly Rupert sat down in her guest chair, and she handed him the tea she had originally prepared for herself.
“I’m afraid it is the house, though,” he nerved himself to say at last, and followed it up with a longish sip of tea.
“Oh?”
He waited till Anne had finished doctoring the second cup and taken it round to her desk chair, where she sat comfortably and raised the cup to her lips.
“Yes,” Rupert said, swallowing. “I’d hoped my earlier misgivings were false…but it seems…well, last night I received a bit of a confirmation that….” He stopped and raised his eyes to her face. She sat waiting.
“I’m afraid the house has been cursed,” Rupert said miserably.
The priest did not ruffle easily, but Rupert thought he was reading correctly the lift of her posture in a sigh and the wry turn of her mouth.
“Oh, dear,” Anne Langland said.
*