Ex Officio
Page 50
She really couldn’t think yet, couldn’t make her mind work in any reliable way. She went upstairs to spend some time with Dinah, the tried and true prescription for when she was depressed or confused, but the little girl was involved with her doll house, and that tiny neat structure with its plastic furnishings suddenly was full of ominous meanings and reminders. Evelyn went back downstairs and outside and walked in the cold air in Dinah’s garden for a while instead. The other Dinah, Bradford’s dead wife. The garden was also dead at this time of year, everything having receded underground to wait for spring.
Bradford and Dinah were both underground, too, with no spring ever to come for either of them. No matter how it was phrased, no matter how it was justified, what the family had done was bury Bradford before he was dead.
When kindness is so cruel, what is cruelty? To tell him the truth?
Yet what were the alternatives? There were none, only the unacceptable choice that had been there all along: to hospitalize him, let him know he was being imprisoned. Though even that wasn’t a true option, if Wellington could be believed. The possibilities had narrowed to two: this false death or some real death in its place, either this unofficial living burial or a hypocritical formal funeral following a sanitary assassination.
After a while Robert came out to join her in the garden, and she said, “Did you get the short straw? Or did you volunteer?”
He frowned at her. “Volunteer for what?”
“To come persuade me.”
He didn’t answer immediately, and when she looked at him she saw he was controlling anger. She wanted him to lose that struggle, she wanted a fight with someone and who better than Robert? But he said, finally, calmly, “Evelyn, nobody doubts for a second that you’ll help. That isn’t why I came out.”
“Nobody doubts it?”
“Wellington has us all boxed,” he said. “You as much as the rest of us. We couldn’t have saved Bradford without him, and the only way to do it was by becoming like him a little bit. I spent a week not telling you his plan, lying to you with my silence every time we were together, every time we went to bed, every time we looked at one another. I did it because I had to, even though I loved you. And you’ll go down there and lie to Bradford every single day for the rest of his life for the same reason.”
“Getting more like Wellington all the time?”
“In that one compartment of your life, yes. But in the rest of your life you can be more free than ever.”
A vision of Ann Gillespie, Carrie’s faded companion in Paris, rose in her mind, mocking her. More free? Wasn’t Bradford’s imprisonment also Evelyn’s imprisonment? Wasn’t Bradford’s burial also Evelyn’s burial? “More free,” she said, turning away.
“Of course more free,” he said. “Don’t you see that it’s over now?”
“Over!” She whirled back to him, face contorted. “It’s a death-watch! It won’t be over until he’s dead!”
“Well, it wouldn’t be anyway, would it? If he were an ordinary man, in an ordinary hospital, wouldn’t you see him as often as you could? Wouldn’t you live close to where he was staying? Would you call that a death-watch?”
“No,” she said. “But it would be. I wouldn’t call it that, but that’s what it would be. And Bradford wouldn’t be in the ground, buried already, he wouldn’t be—be—” She looked around in agitation, trying to find the way to express herself. “It wouldn’t be like this!”
“I know. This isn’t really any different, but it feels different, I know it does, it does to me, too.”
“But it is different! Think of Bradford down there, think of the walls around him, and he’s happy because on the other side of those walls is China. Think about those walls, all around him.”
He frowned. “And?”
“Look around,” she said, and waved an arm at everything around them, the house, the woods and orchards, the hills, the dead garden, the cloud-filled sky. “No walls around us,” she cried. “Are there? Are there?”
Coming quickly forward, Robert took her arms and held them, as though he were afraid she was about to fragment and was determined to hold her together in one piece through the explosion. “Listen to me,” he said urgently. “Bradford’s been the center of your life for as long as I’ve known you, and probably for a lot longer than that. But he isn’t the center anymore; he’s one small responsibility off in a corner of your life.”
Twisting back and forth, not really to get away from him but to express her agitation, she cried, “How can you say that? When I’ve got to—”
“Your life can have a new center now,” he said. “If you’re willing.”
She stopped thrashing, and looked at him.
He said, “Don’t you know I’ve just been waiting for this mess to be resolved so I could ask you to marry me?”
She did know, or at least she’d expected, she’d hoped. It was something she would have fought for. But now, the way things were now? “How could we—? You want to be buried, too?”
“It isn’t burial,” he said. “Listen to me, think straight about this. I can commute to Lancashire, at least till June, it isn’t that far. And by summer I can decide if I want to do something else. Howard’s talked to me about a book based on that Fuehrer article, that’s one possibility.”
She studied his face, and there was neither deceit nor self-sacrifice to be seen in it, only strength and gentleness. She said, “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. We can still have a life, we just have to make Eustace home base, that’s all. And that won’t be so bad, will it?”
She hesitated, still searching his face, but when he smiled she suddenly smiled back. “No,” she said. “It won’t be so bad.”
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