Rope of Sand

by C F Dunn

  “Is that why you do this?” I asked, nodding towards the fire and his family, whose figures were silhouetted or illuminated as they moved around the flames.

  “Yes, I enjoyed it when young so it seemed an equally good thing to continue with my family.”

  “Even if they don’t know the origins of the tradition?”

  “Indeed, but I’m glad you do now.”

  We were quite content to sit silently in each other’s company listening to the jibes between the siblings, and the occasional rejoinder from their mother to moderate their frequent attempts to wrong-foot one another and slam the victim into the snow. They reminded me of puppies testing their strength and dominance against each other, except that puppies had none of their endurance, speed, or dexterity. Ellie received no quarter for being female, and she apparently expected none. Her particular speciality seemed to be in avoiding being captured, as well as deft footwork that landed her behind one of her brothers, upending him before he realized where she was.

  A stray hair had found its way into my mouth, and I removed a glove to locate it better with my fingers.

  “Emma, Henry had a word with me earlier.”

  I found the hair. “Oh?”

  “He said that you’re willing to meet Ellen.” He didn’t give me a chance to confirm or deny it. “So I thought that we could drive over there tomorrow.” He made it sound like a pleasant day out in the country.

  Nerves instantly tightened. I forgot the hair. There remained the possibility that it might snow overnight, or even tomorrow – heavily. I scoured the clear, dark night – stars abundant from horizon to horizon.

  “And the weather should be fine,” he added, lips twitching.

  I huffed. “Can you read my mind, or something?”

  He slid along the tree trunk and slipped his arm around my waist, kissing a wave of hair that had escaped from my hood. “No, but I know you. It’ll be all right, Emma, and it’ll give an old woman a great deal of pleasure to meet someone else. She doesn’t have many other visitors except for us.”

  Joel and Ellie had broken off hostilities and were moving around the remains of the bonfire, using sticks to roll silver-wrapped parcels out of the embers.

  “That’s emotional blackmail, Matthew.”

  “Yes – as I said, I know you.”

  I failed to push him off the log, and he tickled my stomach, making me squeal with agonized laughter until I begged him to stop.

  Joel’s voice cut through my remonstrations. “Behave, you two. Hey, Emma – catch!” Something the size of a tennis ball flew towards me and I automatically reached out to catch it, but Matthew intercepted the object, snatching it as my hand began to close around the foil ball.

  “That was meant for me!” I objected, trying to take it from him, but he held it out of reach.

  “Yes, it was, but I don’t think you would have wanted it.”

  “Aw, spoil my fun, why don’t you?” Joel moaned from where he still stood, outlined by the fire.

  I looked at him suspiciously and then at the silver ball radiating heat in Matthew’s hand. “That was a dastardly trick to play on me, Joel Lynes. You’ve broken the truce and you don’t even know if I like baked potatoes – most underhand. And I bet there isn’t even any butter on it.”

  Joel guffawed. “Yeah, you’re right, that was bad of me. I’ll have to make sure that the old man isn’t around next time.”

  “Excuse me,” Matthew said politely, rising from the log as if taking his leave of the dining table.

  If they were fast, Matthew was faster. He had closed the space between them before Joel had time to react, taking his legs from under him. But Joel anticipated the move and, as he went down, twisted and managed to get his feet on the ground, going into an immediate defensive crouch.

  “Good one, Joel,” Harry called encouragingly. They were standing outside the diminishing circle of light and I went to stand with Dan and Harry, who were watching the developing interplay intently. Joel remained low and watchful as Matthew prowled along an invisible line, moving ever closer towards his prey.

  Joel lunged for him, shoving his right leg behind Matthew’s left, grabbing to throw him, but Matthew pivoted on one foot, stepping over Joel’s leg and away from him as Joel brought his right arm around in an arc to try to catch Matthew on the side of his neck.

  “Whoa, that was close,” Dan murmured.

  The opponents circled each other, Matthew’s face expressionless, Joel’s with a cocky grin. On the other side of the circle, Ellie muttered to herself, repeating the same word over and over. I watched her lips and, with a jolt, realized she chanted “Matthew, Matthew, Matthew” like a mantra.

  Joel dropped down again and Matthew stopped moving, straightening his back. It looked as if he were inviting Joel to attack although he never took his eyes from him for a moment.

  “Come on, old man, you’re getting slow,” Joel drawled; then, without warning, he stepped up to Matthew, landing a hefty punch to his stomach and another to the side of his head. I clapped a hand over my mouth to stop from calling out.

  “He’s fine, don’t worry,” Dan said as if he’d seen it all before.

  “Better,” Matthew remarked, feeling his jaw and dropping his gaze as he did so. Joel took advantage and struck out again but, quick as a rattlesnake, Matthew feinted first to Joel’s right, then to his left, taking him off-guard, whipping Joel’s own arm into a stranglehold around the boy’s neck. Joel tried to struggle but Matthew had him pinned from behind, and the more he moved, the more he choked against his own arm. “Better – but you’re still dead. Don’t leave your enemy standing or in a position to strike. Incapacitate if you can, or kill them if you can’t, but don’t give them a second chance to take you down – they wouldn’t do the same for you. Oh, and apologize to your elders and betters,” he added with a glint in his eye, letting his great-grandson go.

  Joel rubbed his arm, a smirk crossing his face. “Aw, Matthew, that’s not nice. Emma’s not that old…” he managed to say before he realized he had gone a step too far. “I didn’t mean it!” he panicked. “Emma, I apologize…”

  “Too late,” Matthew said grimly, striding towards him and picking him up like a sack of hay. He moved swiftly towards the river with the writhing youth on his back, all the boy’s Army training futile against his superior strength.

  “Oops, you’ve pushed him over the edge,” Harry called out after them as they disappeared into the darkness. A faint splash echoed from the direction of the river and Matthew walked casually back alone and into the circle of light. “That potato should be cool enough to eat now,” he remarked pleasantly to me.

  “Boys’ games,” I rebuked, turning his face into the last light of the embers only to discover not a mark on it. “I take it Joel will be fine?”

  “Of course,” Matthew said, “but the meat won’t be if we leave it for much longer.”

  He went to help Dan lift the pig off the wooden stake driven through its length; there was something primeval about the whole scene.

  A sloshing sound approached from the other side of the bonfire and Joel slouched back, dripping.

  Jeannie fussed up to him, a little unsteady after an evening spent drinking mulled wine, but clear-headed enough to scold him. “Look at you – you’ll catch your death one of these days. Go and get changed.”

  He flinched away from her as she brushed gathering ice from his jacket as it began to freeze. “Chill, Mom, I haven’t caught as much as a cold in my life. Don’t fuss. Hey, Harry, did you see that move? Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah, it was great; your move wasn’t bad either,” Harry laughed, dodging a blow from his older brother. They wandered off leaving their mother with a peculiar mix of soured regret on her face as she watched them.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Meeting Ellen

  Therefore the Love which us doth bind,

  But Fate so enviously debars,

  In the Conjunction of the Mind,
>
  And Opposition of the Stars.

  ANDREW MARVELL (1621–78)

  I’d had better nights. I slept fitfully until about two in the morning then woke, finding Matthew gone from my side. I had eaten too much pork too late into the night, and I lay wakeful, feeling the weight of indigestion in my stomach and nervous anticipation heavy on my mind. I considered going downstairs to join Matthew in his study, but while he didn’t need to sleep, I did and I would need all my wits about me for my meeting with Ellen tomorrow – bother, no – today. I tossed fretfully for another hour or so until the relentless onset of time drove me back to sleep.

  The day dawned as exquisite and bright as the night before had promised, illuminating the gilded frame of the triptych on the bedside table. I took a moment to ask for wisdom and patience during the forthcoming day, and gazed at it for a while, trying to absorb some of the tranquillity it exuded before gathering myself and slipping out of bed. I was up and dressed when Matthew came to find me in the kitchen.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, more out of hope than expectation.

  “Fine, thanks,” I said, although he had already seen the dark shadows beneath my eyes. “I’m ready if you are.”

  The door to the kitchen opened silently as Maggie came in.

  “Good morning, Maggie, we missed you last night,” Matthew greeted her without resentment.

  “I’m afraid that I had urgent work to attend to.” Heavy-lidded eyes flickered in my direction and then away, as emotionless as her expression.

  “Oh? Something interesting?” Matthew asked.

  She smiled stiffly. “That remains to be seen. It has the potential to be most riveting.” Again her eyes slipped towards me, a look Matthew caught, his brow creasing imperceptibly. “You’re off to see Grandma, aren’t you? Do please give her my love.”

  I heard Matthew’s teeth snap together in temper. He stepped forward, but I pulled at his arm. “Matthew, we need to go. Come on,” I said.

  He didn’t refer to Maggie in the car, but he was clearly thinking about her as he hit the accelerator on the open road. I gripped the sides of my seat and he slowed enough for me to start breathing normally again.

  “Sorry,” he apologized.

  “That’s OK,” I said. “Maggie has a way of finding a tender spot and pushing at it until you squeal, doesn’t she?”

  He nodded appreciatively. “That just about sums her up, yes – neatly put. But she hasn’t been this viperish since her teenage years and, even then, she directed it more at the world than her family, although she gave Pat a hard time to begin with.”

  “It’s aimed at me, not anyone else, Matthew. She’ll probably be as sweet as pie when I’ve gone.” I stared through the window at the glorious scenery, not relishing it as much as I would have done in other circumstances.

  He thrummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “You’re not going anywhere. She has nothing to fight against, especially not you. I sometimes wonder if she will ever realize that and stop making her life a misery.”

  And mine, I thought, and everyone else’s. I considered it time to talk about something else – anything else.

  “Last night Joel said something about never having had a cold; did he mean that literally?”

  We caught up with a silver car experiencing difficulty negotiating the sharp bends safely, skidding a little on the icy road.

  “Snow tyres too worn,” Matthew muttered, unusually impatient. He found a straight stretch and overtook without hesitation. When I opened my eyes, the silver car had disappeared out of sight behind the last bend.

  “None of them have ever been ill – nor Dan or Henry. Nor Maggie,” he added. “They’ve never had any childhood infections, myopia, asthma – anything like that. It was one of the things that made Monica suspicious. She kept taking Maggie and her older sister, Ellen, to chickenpox slumber parties, but they were the only two who never caught anything.”

  He concentrated on overtaking a lorry carrying timber before the road curved between canyons of trees and rock, plunging us into semi-darkness.

  “Jeannie doesn’t like the fact that her children are different, does she?”

  We sped around the curve and out into the blinding sun of the open sky. I squinted in the light, noting that Matthew didn’t.

  “She finds that aspect difficult to cope with, yes. She’s always appreciated their intellectual ability of course, although she’s blind to Joel’s – too blinkered to see his potential.” A note of frustration crept into his voice. He did not appear his calm, urbane self this morning, and I wondered if he looked forward to the forthcoming meeting quite as much as he would have me believe.

  Valmont was nothing like any of the nursing homes I had visited in the sad last days of my great-aunts, where faded furnishings matched the dulling eyes of those who had once been so vibrantly alive. It stood in its own expansive grounds on a knoll, with far-reaching views over wooded hills and valleys to the mountains in the distance. The front of the building overlooked terraced lawns, now white under a heavy swathe of snow.

  Matthew helped me out of the car. “Before we go in, don’t be surprised if anyone refers to me as Ellen’s grandson.”

  I reached up on tiptoes and kissed his cheek, quickly wiping away the lipstick I left there with my thumb. “I would be more surprised if they referred to you as her husband,” I pointed out. He acknowledged the logic behind my thought. “So, what do I call her? Mrs Lynes, Ellen, ma’am…?”

  He looked at me sharply, then saw that I teased. I felt in need of some distraction to keep my larynx from tightening so much that I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to call her anything at all.

  “Don’t you dare call her ‘ma’am’. ‘Ellen’ will be just fine.”

  The inside of the building looked as attractive as the exterior, but it managed to be homely at the same time. The cool whites of the walls and rich reds of the carpets in the hall – where an extravagant arrangement of fresh flowers sat on an elegant table – gave the interior more the appearance of an expensive hotel than a nursing home.

  A short, middle-aged man in his early fifties, with thinning once-dark hair and olive-toned skin, approached us with an extended hand. “Dr Lynes, it’s good to see you again. I’m sorry to have missed you the other day.”

  Matthew shook his hand warmly. “Charles – hello. Emma, this is Dr Charles DaCruz. He has been Ellen’s physician for the last six years or so. Charles – this is Dr Emma D’Eresby.” He didn’t expand upon my relationship with him, but from the way the doctor looked at me, he had already made an assumption that fitted neatly with our charade.

  “Dr D’Eresby, well, Mrs Lynes has been looking forward to meeting her grandson’s friend.”

  My mind boggled at what Ellen must have been saying, and forced a look of pleasant interest. “Has she? That’s… good.” My voice came out as thin and strained as my smile, and Dr DaCruz looked momentarily baffled, fingering the side of his eyebrow. “Well, yes,” he said hesitantly, “she’s talked of nothing else for the last few weeks.”

  I felt myself pale and Matthew took my hand. “We’d better get along, Charles,” he said, already moving down the hall.

  “I’ll need to have a word with you later before you go, if I may, Dr Lynes,” he called out after us. Matthew waved his hand in response before we turned a corner and were alone in the plush-carpeted corridor.

  “How do you remember what to say?” I rushed when we were out of earshot, my back against the wall to steady me. Matthew planted a kiss squarely in the middle of my forehead as if trying to instil courage.

  “You get used to it – you’ll get used to it. Lying isn’t so difficult when you have a good enough reason to, and most of the time you can avoid doing even that.” He tipped my chin up and smiled into my eyes. “Ready?”

  I groaned. “As I’ll ever be.”

  I waited outside the double-width door to Ellen’s room, while Matthew went in first to see her. I considered this worse than
waiting to see the dentist, more gut-grindingly awful than the minutes before my doctoral viva interview, and almost as bad as telling Guy that I never wanted to see him again, and seeing the look of desperation cross his face as the initial shock wore off.

  I paced up and down the lobby, the dense carpets absorbing the sound of my feet, listening for the familiar sounds of nursing homes: an aluminium tea trolley on lino floors, or a TV bellowing out sports results nobody listened to. The stillness was almost sepulchral, except that I found peace in it, a quietness that comes with the acceptance of death before it becomes reality.

  I don’t know what I expected to find in the room beyond the door. Ever since I had first heard of Ellen’s existence, I had tried to picture her. Before I knew that she still lived, and when I’d believed Matthew to be a widower, I had tried to visualize the woman whom he had loved and with whose memory I believed I could never compete. Even the photographs of her as a young woman somehow did not relate to the frail old lady sitting just feet away from me now.

  What did I feel – revulsion? Resentment? This was Matthew’s wife, a woman the same age as my grandmother, who – like Nanna – hung between death and life. God forgive me, but is this what I would become should I live as long? A brittle carapace waiting to die, binding her husband to her with bonds of law and loyalty, preventing our union with fingers embedded in his life as she was slowly torn from him by time.