The Long Afternoons
by L. Inman
Under the ministrations of Mr Robson’s doctor friend, Rupert Giles recovered his health: slowly, for he was getting to that age where one first begins to notice that one’s body is less apt to bounce back quickly from severe punishment. It was hot in the little bedroom of Elisabeth’s flat, and she kept the windows cracked to tempt in a breeze, though that ploy was mostly cancelled out by the ceiling fan’s rickety whirl overhead. Rupert kept his eyes shut for the most part, and when the images that played out hatefully on the inside of his eyelids grew to be too much, he opened them and trained his gaze vacantly on the dark blades of the fan as they whirled, blurring with speed; watching the gyration of the chain-pull with its battered china weight below the motor; soaking in with peripheral vision the dance of leaf-shadows on the walls and outside the window, where a wizened and stubborn wistaria embraced the casement.
But mostly he kept his eyes shut.
He listened instead: to the soft pad of Elisabeth’s feet as she moved about the flat; learned to recognize her usual sounds in the kitchen (at a distance) and bathroom (near to hand); puzzled over a sound like mice in the walls until he realized it was a keyboard—Elisabeth at work. She did not say much to him, except to check on him every so often or to let him know when she was leaving the flat and for how long. She invariably helped him when he needed to go to the bathroom, but as he recovered, his pride recovered too, and he took to waiting till she was gone on some errand or other before creeping shakily to the toilet. Too weak both to stand for a prolonged period and to heave himself up from the tub, he elected that afternoon to give himself a sponge bath, propped up against the sink counter, which was truncated both by his dizziness and by the sound of Elisabeth’s feet on the front steps. She caught him creeping back to the bedroom, damp hand braced against the wall, and chided him gently before guiding him the rest of the way back to bed.
A day passed like this, Rupert thought: possibly two, if you counted the possibility that he had dropped into a stunned sleep during the dark hours of the night.
Rupert was not looking forward to the nights.
He shut his eyes, and dozed for another interminable period. The light changed in the room, almost imperceptibly, and the ceiling fan whirred and clicked.
He was waked from his doze when Elisabeth sat down slowly on the edge of the bed next his side. “Hey there,” she said softly. “How you doing?”
She had the kind of voice, Rupert reflected muzzily, that was deceptively sweet—reedy and unaggressive, it made one neglect to notice right away when she was being tart or sarcastic. It was probably, he thought, a double annoyance to the people who knew and loved her. Loved her. If there were such people in this dimension, which in time there probably would be.
There was powerful love in him, and it had been suddenly, forcibly blocked. But that was how it worked (he kept telling himself this): that was how it worked. You lost those you loved, and then you were yourself lost. That was how it worked.
That was how....
He gave a small sound, not strong enough to be a groan.
Elisabeth petted his hand gently.
She wasn’t going anywhere, at least not now. She was here, and hell, she had already died once, so she wasn’t likely to—but then that had also been true of—
She was here, and her flat smelled of books and her sheets smelled of—rosemary, or wintergreen, he could no longer tell—and her soft brown hair was gathered up in a working knot that wept flyaway russet tendrils, and she was quick and solid and alive and nicely woman-shaped—
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
With an effort Rupert fixed his attention on her meaning, rather than his, and let his eyes go unfocused. There were a number of flavors of discomfort within him, but he couldn’t tell if one of them was hunger or not. He quirked his head sideways in a little shrug.
“I got soup,” she said. “Wanna give it a try?”
He gave another little shrug, and would have made an assenting noise, but his voice got caught on a patch of dryness and all he did was cough painfully.
She went away. Rupert closed his eyes for a few minutes, until she was back and bringing with her a rich, piquant scent.
“It’s potato,” she said. “With a little curry. Want help sitting up?”
He grunted, fending off her free hand with his, and inched himself into the beginnings of a seated position. It hurt. He kept forgetting what movements hurt. He reached for the mug with vague hands; she kept a fingerhold on it until she was sure he had it, then let him take his time reaching for the spoon.
“I’ve never served this to anybody but myself,” she said, with a self-deprecating lift of one shoulder. “So don’t pretend to like it, if you don’t.”
It was a pureed soup (that explained the furious buzzing noise that had crept into his dozing consciousness): he spooned up a dollop and put it to his lips, tasting. Then he ate the rest of the spoonful and took another. He ate three more spoonsful in quick succession before realizing that he might make himself sick eating that fast, and forced himself to slow down. He took his time scraping the last drops from the mug in order to scrape a dribble of opinion to give her: he wasn’t even sure whether he did like the taste, except that it was exactly what one wanted, and now it was all gone.
Giving his opinion turned out not to be necessary, however: when he looked up at her he saw a brief smile of satisfaction cross her face. “More?” she asked.
He thought about it. “Later, I think,” he said, clearing his throat.
She took the mug and spoon from him, and he settled down to shut his eyes once more.
*
Dr Kettering-Carter returned a few hours later and pronounced him on the mend, provided he stick to bed rest for the next 48 hours. Rupert did not protest, though Elisabeth gave him a significant look from over the doctor’s shoulder. He didn’t mind that either: it was precisely what he’d come for, the quiet limbo of a place apart, guarded by a friend. Here, he thought, he could sleep.
And he did: all the rest of that day, and through the night, he drowsed and slumbered by turns, only occasionally troubled by dreams. The dreams were pretty bad, but nothing like what he’d feared when awake, and when he found himself uttering drowned noises, he felt another’s touch on his shoulder, on his hair, firm and present. He accepted the touch, submerged himself again.
In the morning he woke, fully, in one painless second, to realize that the doctor had been right: he was on the mend. Though it was still painful to move, and the nausea still waited at a distance, his body was doing its job.
Now if only his soul would as well. But he suspected he had maimed it.
After some cogitation, he decided he was bored enough to try and get up. Hell with Robson and his doctor friend; “very nice of them to—” he muttered— “take a concern—” He broke a sweat sitting up, but merely waited till the room stopped tilting before beginning the task of getting to his feet.
It ended with him swaying on his pins, one hand on the wall, feeling like complete roadkill, but he’d done it. He looked around him: Elisabeth had done her best to keep the room tidy, but the bedding was sour and the air was full of the smell of sickness.
Quietly Rupert padded out to the den area. There was no sound in the flat, and, sweating, Rupert pushed his exploration to the little dining space by the kitchen. The table was covered with books topped by a note in a familiar hurriedly neat hand:
Rupert, go back to bed. I’ve gone out for groceries. Will be back soonest.
—E.
An alien contortion crept over his face, and he realized after a moment that it was a smile.
Hand out to contact each sturdy surface between him and the bedroom, Rupert went slowly back to bed, but not to lie down. Painfully he peeled the bedding off the mattress, dumped the pillows out of their cases, and gathered up the resulting pile to carry out to Elisabeth’s small rickety washer. As the water began to fill and take the detergent he’d dumped in with the sheets and blankets, he braced his hands on the edge and breathed himself slowly back into strength.
Elisabeth had made herself a bed on her own couch. Rupert stole the sheets she had used to make up the bed he’d stolen from her. When the sheets he was washing were clean, she could have them. His plan was to make this switch while she was gone, but two things thwarted him. First, stretching to work the fitted sheet onto her mattress hurt the wounded muscles of his stomach—how on earth he had managed to remain numb enough to pick and win a fight with Robson was now incomprehensible—and he ended by collapsing onto the bed and pulling the counterpane anyhow over him.
The second thing was that Elisabeth came home in a rattle of grocery bags.
He lay, panting, listening to her bumping around in the kitchen. It took her a surprisingly long time for her to notice that the washer was going, long enough for him to kick the counterpane into a semblance of straightness over him and settle the uncovered pillows behind his head. He now felt much dirtier than the bed.
She came in and lounged against the doorframe. Rupert shut his eyes, though it was futile to hope she’d think he was hovering just above sleep.
When she spoke, there was humor in her voice. “Well, now that the bed is clean, you probably feel a bit out of place. Why don’t I run you some bath water?”
He opened his eyes, but she was gone.
Rupert listened to the bath taps run a room away. When they shut off, Elisabeth came back into the room, carrying a frayed blue terrycloth robe. “This won’t fit you,” she said, “but it’ll give you some cover—I’ll put your shorts and shirt in the wash with the other things.” She went away.
The robe did not fit, as she had said, but he wrapped it round himself, leaving his clothing on the floor, and padded weakly into the bathroom.
She had filled the tub with gently-warm water, full enough to cover his thighs without submerging his wound. He peeled off the dressing; it looked well enough that he thought he might be able to go without a full bandage.
He washed, slowly, and rinsed off with a plastic shell Elisabeth kept in the tub for the purpose. Then he dippered water over his head and washed his hair. He was shaking, but clean, by the time he gathered strength to clamber out of the tub.
She had left his shaving kit by the sink, with a hand towel laid out next to it: Rupert felt a pang in his gut that had nothing to do with his wound. He took a moment to recover from the simple courtesy of it before anchoring himself against the counter and beginning to shave.
He badly needed it.
When it was finished and he was drying his face with the towel, he met the eyes of his reflection in the mirror, and paused.
Everything young in his face was gone.
I can’t do it anymore, if these are the
choices.
He no longer had the spirit to be angry, that his own sacrifices had been seen as trifling compromises. Maybe they had been. Maybe that British penchant for traveling the via media was nothing more than a cowardly syncretism. He was too tired to think it out, and he didn’t know if he cared. His part in the play was done, anyhow.
“A touch of the Pyrrhic about this,” he murmured to his reflection, noting the slow return of color to his cheeks.
*
Elisabeth sat down to her computer, her hearing attuned to the sound of Rupert’s movements in the bathroom. He was moving slowly, it seemed; but he was all right. She forced herself to read the last paragraph she’d written, and to add to it.
Her earlier inward churlishness had given way to a simple recognition of the tasks at hand; the bed needed changing, so she did that—Rupert needed fresh clothing, so she did that. It was a relief to do these things without pushing thought too far forward or inward—and the mere surface was troubling enough: Elisabeth knew, even if he didn’t, that it was the weight of grief that kept him fastened to the bed as much as illness.
She had wondered, before she knew him, what this part of the story looked like, what faltering steps of recovery had made prints in the ashes. But in those days and in that dimension she could wonder idly, then turn without concern to the real life before her. Now, her hands were forcibly idle on the keyboard and the faltering recovery was happening a room away.
He’ll be angry at me when he thinks about it, she thought. How could he help it? I’ve been here all along, knowing he would come to this.
She had been here, but she had not been waiting. Part of the impetus to get a flat outside College had come from a deep need for privacy for her own grief. In between books and tutorials and long stints at the keyboard, she had paced her way from room to room, driven between periods of furious housekeeping and fervid lassitude, turning up the volume on any song that howled out disconnect and abandonment. She had burst into abortive sobs on any number of occasions (mercifully always when she’d been alone) and hid herself in prayer, trying out chapels everywhere in the university before establishing haunts for herself that were quiet enough.
She had found herself simultaneously rejoicing in her irrevocable solitude and aching for a faster growth of connection in this new world of hers.
Elisabeth came to and realized she’d been sitting dumbly for several minutes. She shook herself and opened her ragged paperback of Phantastes to the sticky-note bookmark near the end.
The door to the bathroom opened and she looked up with the book forked in her hand; then quickly stifled a smile.
Rupert shuffled into the room, her robe hitched inadequately about him, the hem riding comically up to his knees. He gave her a long look. “It’s all right,” he said finally. “You can laugh.”
At this she did smile. “There are some clothes for you on the bed. Do you need a new bandage?”
He only grunted for answer, and disappeared in search of his clothing.
The clothes she had left him were his pajamas, which, when she had unpacked them, looked completely unused. She gave him what she considered an adequate time to cover himself, passing the time by typing in the relevant blockquote of the Macdonald, and then got up to check on him.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, pajama shirt open, surveying his uncovered wound with a thoughtful frown. She pulled the first-aid kit from its shelf by the bed; he made only a perfunctory protest before allowing her to dress the tender black row of stitches. For a long silent moment she worked, on her knees before him, her gaze bent on her task.
Presently he lifted a hand and tucked a stray bit of her hair back into its knot at the back of her head. She looked up at him briefly; he was not smiling, but his face was calm. She returned her gaze to her hands securing the new bandage; then she stood. “If you’re hungry,” she said, “I can make us some lunch.”
After a characteristic hesitation, he nodded, and she went without ado to the kitchen.
*
Rupert had progressed into silence, she saw as she served him a sandwich and soup at the rickety dining table. She sat down to eat with him, making no effort to draw him out with small talk despite the occasional awkward urge. She observed his hands moving tentatively to lift his cup, to ply salt and pepper for his cup of soup, as if he had forgotten what directly influencing the world felt like.
After lunch he elected to huddle on the couch, her trusty down blanket on his pajama’d lap, while she worked at her paper, shuffling books and typing in short bursts at the keyboard. His silence continued, permeating the flat and tweaking at her nerves, but when she stole glances at him she saw that he was returning to a state of alertness greater than any she’d seen since he came. Such alertness, she reflected, was bound to be unpleasant; so she left him alone.
*
In the evening, before the sun had fully set but a while after teatime, she helped him to bed. He sank back into the clean bedding with a little sigh, and she pulled the covers over him, left a glass of water for him on the night-table, and began to retreat.
“Elisabeth?”
She turned. But he closed his lips after a moment, his words gone unspoken, and she returned to the bedside. His eyes were on her face, his expression unreadable; but he seemed still to want her attention, so she sat down gingerly at his side.
They looked at each other for a long moment.
At last Rupert cleared his throat and murmured:
“Seems the tables have turned now, have they not?”
She found a smile coming to her face. “Maybe I’ve paid my debt to you a little,” she replied, reaching out a hand to smooth a curl of his hair.
He shut his eyes. “I’ve told you. You owe me nothing.”
She made no answer: there was nothing she could say to do justice to her bedrock gratitude, and she knew he did not expect her to try.
“So much to do,” he murmured at length.
“It’ll get done,” she said. “You rest.”
“I sometimes wonder,” he said, eyes shut, “if I owe it.”
He did not elaborate, but she knew what he meant. She sighed. “Who can tell?”
He gave a small hum for answer, and slipped into sleep.
*
The next morning, Rupert was appreciably better. He puttered into the livingroom where Elisabeth was still dozing on the couch, and continued into the kitchen, to put water on for tea. He opened the cupboard: Elisabeth had four mugs, all mismatched, plus an equally mismatched collection of saucers, salad plates, and soup bowls. He chose a mug for himself that looked comfortable to hold; it was clean—Elisabeth left dirty dishes in the sink, he noticed, but never put any dish away unless she was satisfied it was clean enough. All my toys still look like they came out of the box, she had told him once, and he believed it despite the state of native disarray in the flat.
Rupert sipped his tea and studied his surroundings. Elisabeth had clearly done her best to furnish her new flat according to her taste, though the general shabbiness of everything testified to her limited budget. In the loft, her collection of books was housed in a neatly-stacked aggregate of crates and cartons that served as shelves; the tables and desk were battered but clean-lined in their shape; the only table lamp in the room was a brass-and-crazed-glass monstrosity, but she had bought a new shade for it and clearly spent some time polishing its surfaces.
His eyes drifted back to the books. For someone who had only lived six months in this dimension, she had certainly acquired a lot of books. Of course, this was something English scholars did as a matter of course, but he could see at a glance that many of the books had been found on the bookscouting trail. And yet he suspected that Elisabeth had either unlearned, or never had, the tendency to hoard books—he could easily imagine her finding homes for these and hitting the trail again if need be. It was a contradiction that intrigued him, and he wondered if it would be worthwhile to copy it.
Presently Elisabeth drew in a sharp breath and struggled to a hunched sitting position on the couch. She rubbed her eyes mercilessly, and opened them to see him sipping his tea in the kitchen doorway. And she smiled, and dropped back on her pillow.
“Morning,” she mumbled. But it was the smile that had undone him. After all this, and she was glad to see him first thing in the morning.
“Shall I cook breakfast?” he heard himself say.
“You up to it?”
“Well, I’ve been on my feet half an hour already and I haven’t fainted yet,” he said, wincing at his own caustic tone. But when she sat up again her face was untroubled.
“Cool,” she answered. “I’m going to hit the shower.”
As she got up and went into the bathroom, he returned to the kitchen, and braced a white-knuckled hand on the counter.
*
Elisabeth was much relieved that he was visibly better. She stood under the hot spray and let it wash down the residue of her worry. He was going to recover, and she was going to finish her paper.
She dared not scratch the surface of that thought, to the deeper worries that lay beneath.
It was almost like old times: Rupert cooked them eggs and toast, and they shifted themselves each a seat at the book-and-paper-heaped dining table to eat. As had become their wont, they ate without idle conversation, in a comfortable silence.
At last Elisabeth pushed her plate away from her and sighed. “That was good,” she said. “Thank you. You never fail to make a good scrambled egg. And in my skillet, too: that’s a feat.”
He offered her a little wry smile, and she was grateful that he had chosen to forgo the verbal comment on her kitchenware—the one about the lamp was bad enough.
“I’ll do the washing up,” she said, jumping up and taking their plates.
“I’ll help,” he said.
Elisabeth washed, and Rupert dried, water dripping on their bare toes, the sleeves of Elisabeth’s robe slipping down dangerously near the running water. Finally Rupert put down his dishtowel and turned her sleeves up for her. She chuckled and thanked him.
He smiled back, but as she glanced at him, she thought she saw a drawn look take over his features. She turned back to the sink.
“You seem to be feeling better,” she said.
“Much,” Rupert said, with a note of strained cheer Elisabeth thought she recognized.
She carried the dried plates to the cabinet and stacked them neatly inside, rising on tiptoe.
“We traded robes again,” he said, watching her.
She gave a little snort: the observation was almost nonsensical, except that she knew what he was thinking of.
“But mine looks better on you than yours does on me,” he said softly.
She sighed, without turning around; and she was pained but not surprised when he stepped up gently behind her and put his face into her damp hair, one hand finding a resting place on her shoulder. Even as she shut her eyes against the ache she reached up to touch his hand; and he slipped his other hand round her waist and burrowed his face further against her neck. He was not exactly shaking, but she felt a tremor in him that was not desire, and not weakness.
She needed to turn around, to talk him into a different path, but as she turned he nestled his face against hers and kissed her, and it was herself she needed to talk round, because his hands were tender and his lips and breath needy—
Gently, she smoothed her hands up the fronts of his pajamas to his chest, and pressed inexorably until the kiss broke.
“Don’t, please don’t tell me it’s a bad idea,” he said at once. “I’m not—it’s only—I just—”
Her throat was choked silent. All she could do was look up into his chaotic eyes.
“Oh dear,” he said. “You’ve got no-face.”
Despite herself her lips twitched, and he broke into a desperate giggle.
“God,” he
said, “I’ve got to get out of
His laugh was a sob, and then it was not a laugh. He dropped his head and choked tearlessly.
Her lips made his name, voiceless, and she reached to hold him close; unresisting, he rested his brow on her shoulder and shook with quiet, dry sobs.
She knew these not-tears; knew they were merely the seal and cork of a bitter vintage that was sometimes never actually served. Shutting her eyes, she held him: and for a terrible moment it seemed to her that she would do anything for him, anything to end or soothe or at least muffle up his pain. But she kept still, and the dizzy moment passed, and she was once more standing as he was standing, both untrammeled agents, both wounded soldiers.
Presently he recovered himself and straightened up. “I’m—terribly sorry,” he said, scraping his hands down his tearless face and drawing a long breath. “Really—unforgivable. I’ve no business—no right—”
She touched his arm. “Rupert, really. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
In a desperate attempt to recover his insouciance, he said: “So—what were your plans today?”
She gave him a wry look. “Well, I was going to try to knock hell out of this paper. I’ve only got one stage of the argument left. It’s been a difficult thesis to work out.”
“Oh?” he said, with a visible mustering of interest. “And what’s it about?”
“The debt of Victorian fairy-tales to Romantic ethics and philosophy.”
This did interest him. “Would you—would you read me some of it?” he said, shyly.
She brightened. He had found a distraction, and she had found an equal mind to give her some feedback. “Sure.”
She retrieved her laptop from the clutter of her desk, and brought it to the dining table where they both could sit. “Mind you, it’s going to be crap,” she warned him nervously, and began to read.
Naturally enough, reading an essay aloud to an intelligent friend served to make her even more critical than she would have been had she been reading it aloud to her tutor. She winced inwardly at every infelicitous phrasing and misdirected sentence, but was also shyly pleased that the premise was still as sound as it had been when she conceived it, and that he seemed to be listening more and more intently as she went on. “Ultimately,” she read, “the very concept of death is assumed into this process of Becoming, making use, as romantic irony does, of inherent contradictions so that the contradictions become the basis for both a great cosmic joke and a great cosmic tragedy. Death becomes fruitful, not merely through causality, but through its own not-so-final nature—and here,” she broke off to add, “is the last quote I have from Phantastes,” not noticing that his look had become drawn.
I was dead, (she quoted) and
right content. I lay in my coffin, with
my hands folded in peace. The knight, and the lady I loved, wept over me. Her
tears fell on my face. “Ah!” said the
knight, “I rushed amongst them like a madman. I hewed them down like brushwood.
Their swords battered on me like hail, but hurt me not. I cut a lane through to
my friend. He was dead. But he had throttled the monster, and I had to cut the
handful out of its throat, before I could disengage and carry off his body.
They dared not molest me as I brought him back.” “He has died
well,” said the lady. My spirit rejoiced. They left me to my
repose….It was not that I had in any way ceased to be what I had been. The very
fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die;
which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown
dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to
lead a purely spiritual life. If my passions were dead, the souls of the
passions, those essential mysteries of the spirit which had imbodied themselves
in the passions, and had given to them all their glory and wonderment, yet
lived, yet glowed, with a pure, undying fire. They rose above their vanishing
earthly garments, and disclosed themselves angels of light. But oh, how
beautiful beyond the old form! I lay thus for a time, and lived as it were an
unradiating existence; my soul a motionless lake, that received all things and
gave nothing back; satisfied in still contemplation, and spiritual
consciousness.
There was more, because Elisabeth had typed in the whole passage planning to prune the blockquote later, but as she read the harmonic overtones of the words rose in a billow and overpowered her. She did not even get to the part where Anodos expressed his gratitude that they had not buried him in a graveyard, but choked to silence on “spiritual consciousness,” and sat quiet, burning eyes downcast, as still as he.
Her hands were still on the table, and her throat hurt too much to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered at last. “I’m so sorry.”
She could not look at him; but he reached out and stroked her hand, comfortingly, and she raised brimming eyes to his. What she saw there made her snatch her gaze away again, and fight for her breath and her vision.
“You should be angry with me,” she said, clearing her throat.
“But that would hardly be fair,” he said, softly.
She looked back at him then: he had lowered his chin and was looking up at her, his gaze steadfast and earnest. She answered him only with a wry look, which he returned with a faint twitch of the lips.
He released her hand and cleared his throat. “Is there more?” he said.
She didn’t have the heart to read more of the Macdonald. “Half a sentence or so,” she said miserably. “I’m going to finish up with the concept of romantic irony and how it means that things don’t ever stop or perfect themselves, just shed continual husks of meaning. It always goes on,” she repeated with a sigh.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
She didn’t answer him, and he reached to touch her hand again briefly, then rose to his feet. “I think I’m going to have my bath now,” he said, “and give you a chance to work. It’s going to be a very good paper.”
He went away; but she did not return to her work. Instead, she listened dully to his movements in the bathroom—heard the shower start—not a sit-down bath, then….
But she went still at a new sound: unsure she had really heard it, she raised her head, heart beating. He had coughed, perhaps. But no; it was there again, buried in the soft roar of the shower spray: a stifled keening mingled with choked sobs.
Rupert was weeping, after all.
Elisabeth lost courage. She put her face in her hands, wishing she too could weep, unable to stir herself away from the old ache.
*
The rest of the day passed without event. After his shower, Rupert resumed his pajamas and went back to bed, clearly exhausted. Elisabeth forced herself to go back to work on the paper, all the time painfully aware of each nuance of radiating meaning in her argument as it unfolded. She trimmed the Macdonald quote severely, but could not avoid discussing a subsequent line—“With this, a pang and a terrible shudder went through me; a writhing as of death convulsed me; and I became once again conscious of a more limited, even a bodily and earthly life.” She felt nauseated. “It always goes on,” she whispered; and Rupert did not know.
“I have to give him what I can,” she said to herself.
*
She passed a very restless night, but Rupert slept soundly and peacefully: every time she checked on him, she found him deep in calm-faced unconsciousness. “And so it begins,” she said shortly before dawn, touching his hair lightly.
*
The next day Rupert spent holed up in the bedroom with the phone, touching base with Sunnydale and arranging a flight itinerary to go home. “There’s a direct flight leaving late tonight,” he told her at lunchtime.
She pulled off her glasses and let the book she was quoting fall shut. “You think you’re up to it?” she asked him. But the question was merely a formality: she could tell that he was, in fact, up to it. And his grief, she knew, had reached the stage of restlessness. It was a stage she knew very well.
He thought about it. “I think so,” he said. “Probably need a long sleep when I get there.”
She nodded. “Why don’t we go to my pub for lunch?”
A faint, brief smile touched his face. “You have a pub now?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” she said; but she was smiling.
*
They spent longer at the pub than they might have done, for it was good to both of them to get out of the flat. She was pleased to see that his appetite had returned; he polished off most of a ploughman’s lunch and finished up with another pint, while she took care of a shepherd’s pie and nursed a draft cider.
“I hadn’t given much thought to what I’d do later,” he said at length, taking a deep pull at his ale, his gaze lost out the window. “I suppose…I suppose it’s time to start over.”
It was on
the tip of her tongue to say that
“You think you’ll come home?” she asked him, after a long moment.
“It’s what’s been in my mind,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
But I do, she thought. She cast her gaze down to the bottom of her cider glass.
They said no more, but finished their drinks in a melancholy amity.
*
The sun was setting when Rupert pulled the zipper of his suitcase shut. At Elisabeth’s insistence, he let her wheel it out to his rental car and load it into the trunk. She put down the boot lid with a thunk. “You will take care of yourself, won’t you,” she said, not making it a question.
“Of course,” he said. “Stop fussing.”
She gave him a look, and he rolled his eyes, accepting the admonishment.
As she mounted the steps to her flat, he said softly, “I’m very much obliged to you.”
Their eyes met, she halfway up the steps, he at the foot. “Not at all,” she said, equally softly.
“Shall I give you a call,” he said, with a slight hesitation, “when I land?”
“Please,” she said. “And—Rupert—” He paused in turning away. “Call me any time you happen to feel like it. I’ll be here, you know,” she said, with a wry smile, “writing papers about fairy tales.”
She could tell by his eyes that he took her meaning. He reached up a hand, and she took it. Then they released one another, and he went to get into his car.
Elisabeth meandered up the rest of the steps, watching him start the motor and give her a last glance; but she went inside instead of watching him out of sight.
*
The flat was oddly quiet without another human being in it; but Elisabeth couldn’t tell if it was relief or sadness that settled in her chest as she took her first breath of solitude in five days. Whatever it was, she shook off its lassitude and went to pull up her near-finished paper. She had a great deal of work to do.
Elisabeth went into the kitchen, to make herself a cup of tea.
*
finis