by C F Dunn
I should have run – I should have taken the opportunity while his back was turned and fled into the snow. I should have ripped the door open and plunged into the known blackness to escape the unknown darkness that tore at his soul.
But I didn’t.
Perhaps shock prevented me from moving, perhaps the knowledge that to flee into the wilderness was as good a way of ensuring my death from exposure as Matthew deliberately snuffing out the flame of my life. But neither was true. I stayed because I would gladly – willingly – have given him my life if it could have made his suffering any less. I stayed because he didn’t expect me to, and because he needed me – and because I needed him.
I neither moved nor spoke. My mouth had turned to ash and every breath I drew through it was desiccation. My heart no longer thudded, but jumped – fitful and sporadic – like the convulsions of a decapitated frog. The table became a welcome friend, propping me up until my legs once more had a role to play in supporting me.
We continued to stand where we were and silence stood with us, its presence oppressive. Eventually Matthew straightened. I could see his reflection in the black mirror of the window, fractured with the pale cobwebs that shattered his image. He stared back at me, his eyes dark points glaring from the phantom of his face. His voice sounded flat and dead.
“Why are you still here?”
I remained silent, waiting for the re-emergence of the molten anger that had erupted from nowhere. He turned from the window. “Why are you still here, Emma?” he repeated, and this time, his question was one of genuine bewilderment.
I found my voice from somewhere. “Where else would I go?”
He knew I didn’t refer to the frozen land beyond the cabin. I waited, and the minutes passed. Finally, I could stand it no longer.
“What was that all about, Matthew?”
It was his turn not to answer and he continued to stare without perceiving, his head averted.
“Matthew!”
He turned his face slowly towards me.
“Why are you still here? Why are you not running from me – after what I said to you? You were frightened – I saw it – I could taste it. But here you still stand.”
He shook his head, confused.
“Yes, and here I’ll stay. What you became just now – that frightened me – but I’m not scared of you, Matthew. I don’t believe you would have hurt me, no matter what you said you would do.” His shoulders slumped and he suddenly aged with the burden he carried. “Why are you trying to frighten me off? What have I done?”
The snarl resurfaced. “You? You haven’t done anything.”
I backed away again. He stepped forward, his hand out to me, pleading.
“No – Emma, please, you’re right, I won’t hurt you – not like that. But I am going to hurt you in other ways – I can see no other choice. I am going to hurt you and I don’t know whether you will ever be able to forgive me.”
CHAPTER
15
Secrets and Ties
My heart collapsed into the pit of my stomach.
“Is that why you brought me here, so that I couldn’t run?” His lack of an answer verified my assumption. “What can be so bad that you think I would want to, anyway?”
His eyes slid to my face and then away again.
He banked the fire right up until the log burner was stacked full, his hand placing the timber in the middle of the flames leaving no more than a slight reddening of his skin that disappeared almost as soon as he withdrew it. The fire belted out heat but I felt cold. A steady stream of freezing air filtered from the broken window, now no more effective at insulating the room from the elements than a single sheet of glass. But had the triple-glazing been intact, I would still have shivered, both from the shock of what had happened and from the expectation of what might come.
He had hardly spoken since.
I sat stiffly, crammed against the arm of the taupe cord sofa, still fearful of his reactions and watching him warily. He made slow, deliberate movements and kept as far away from me as the confines of the seating area would allow. I strove to think of anything he could have done that might horrify me the way he believed it would.
A burning log fell against the glass of the door, breaking the taut silence.
“Is it because you have killed – is that it?”
“Yes, I have killed – a long, long time ago – and I would have killed again if you hadn’t stopped me.”
His eyes reflected the frantic dance of the flames.
“You said I was a whore, Matthew.”
I couldn’t keep the hurt from my voice; he had made all my longing for him seem cheap and dirty – no more than an overzealous slut in a hotel room.
His head snapped up. “No, Emma, I did not. I said that I would make a whore of you if I…” He swore quietly under his breath before he continued. “I asked you what you see when you look at me.” He checked that I remembered, but it was something I would find hard to forget. “I’m going to rephrase that; what do you know of me?”
I licked my lips nervously, wondering where this would lead.
“I… I know what you have told me,” I said, hesitant.
He pulled a face, indicating regret. “I won’t get angry, no matter what you say.”
“I know what I found out – you know that now, too. I know what others have said about you…”
“Ah.” He nodded, a twist to his mouth. I stopped again, waiting for the reaction. “Go on,” he said. “What do people say?”
“That you are one of the finest surgeons they know, a bit of a loner, a family man.”
“Ah,” he said again. My hand went up to my cross to jumpily fiddle with it. He followed every movement I made.
“What about my family?”
His tone had that quality that made me flinch, overly calm, searing in its softness.
“That you are devoted to them,” I said desperately. His eyes glinted and he leaned towards me, the firelight illuminating one side of his face, the shadow-side almost demonic in the dark contrast into which it was thrown.
“And?”
“And? And what? That you… you…” I began to stutter. I swallowed. “That you came to Maine after your wife’s death…”
He startled me by leaping to his feet without warning, lithe as a cat, and began treading the small square in front of the fire.
“My wife, yes. I’m a widower – isn’t that right, Emma?”
His head swivelled to look directly at me and he stopped pacing for a second,
“Y… yes.”
A humourless smile carved across his face.
“Well, that isn’t quite the case.”
“What?”
A horrible, familiar sensation began to form where my stomach should have been. I wasn’t following the script. He began his patrolling again – back and forth, back and forth.
“Emma, my wife isn’t dead.”
I felt as if he had just inserted his hand into my gut and was extracting it piece by piece.
“She’s alive? You’re still married?”
I waited for him to deny it, to say that it had all been a misunderstanding – even a sick joke – but he continued marking out my heartbeats with every step he took.
“You lied to me?”
He ceased pacing. “Isn’t it what I do best?”
His words sank into place.
I was on my feet, yelling at him, blind fury taking over every sinew of my body, all fear and caution gone.
“You lied to me all this time? You could have told me – you utter and total bastard!… I would never, ever have looked at you, never let you touch me, if I’d known. I would have done anything for you, I would have died for you, I believed in you… And you do this to me… you’ve betrayed me, you’ve betrayed her.”
And I flew at him as I had never done at Guy, because Guy had meant nothing to me in comparison to what this man had become. I wanted to hurt him in any way I could, I wanted him to suffer
as I had, as I did, in the only way I could express it: beating him, hitting him, flailing against his chest, welcoming the pain it brought to my own arms as they made contact with his hard body, the frenzy of my attack made more passionate by the futility of it all. The pain became unbearable and he grabbed both of my arms and so I kicked at him instead, but he just stood back so that I abused nothing but the air. Overwhelmed with frustration, unable to find the words to tell him how his own had shredded my heart, I tried to break free from his grip, wrestling without result, ready to run, wanting to run, ready to find oblivion out in the frozen expanse. But he wouldn’t let me go. I wrenched to free myself from him, my arm screaming in pain where the newly healed bone threatened to break again.
“No, Emma – stop!”
I tried to bite his hand, but he held it out of reach, so I tried to break his thumb instead, but it was useless; I was trapped.
“Emma – stop. Enough!”
He let go of one of my arms, then the other, swiftly encasing me in a ring of steel made of his own arms so that I couldn’t move any more. I attempted to twist out of them, duck beneath them, but there was no give in the cage he made around me.
“Enough, Emma; that’s enough now.” His voice poured balm on my wrath, but I would have none of it.
“No!”
“Emma, shh.”
How dare he – how dare he try to calm me!
“NO! You lied, you lied! Let… go… of… me.”
“No.”
“Bastard! Let me go – now!”
“No, Emma.”
I pushed against his arms, dug my nails into his hands, but nothing I did made any impression on the confinement in which he held me.
“Let me go… please…”
Exhausted, what fight I had left in me evaporated, and my legs gave way. Matthew continued to hold me until he could feel my sobs coming harsh and freely, then he lowered me onto the sofa, where I buried my head in the deep upholstery, my body shuddering convulsively. He found a heavy blanket and wrapped it around me and then left me to cry.
I had been such a fool – hadn’t he said as much only a short while ago? What ever made me think I could trust him any more than I could have trusted Guy? But I thought I could – my handsome, clever, good and trustworthy doctor – who had risked exposure to save me, who had crossed the Atlantic to bring me back, who undoubtedly loved me. But not enough. Not enough to tell me the truth and not enough to leave his wife for me. For all his extraordinary past, his present was as fallible, as imperfect, as mortal as my own. My anger burned from deep within – an all-consuming furnace that rendered void all other emotion – his betrayal complete.
“Emma, have this.” I felt the touch of his hand on my shoulder, and shook him off roughly.
“Drink this, you need it, it’ll help.” His hand lay insistently on me.
“I don’t want it,” I barked at him.
“I know you don’t, but drink it anyway.”
I steadfastly refused to move and I heard him sigh and put something down on the floor. Placing his hands under my arms, he lifted me like a child, turning me around and putting me back on the sofa so that I faced him. I tried to cross my arms in denial of him but they hurt, and he winced. He crouched in front of me, lower than my line of sight so that I would have to turn my head to avoid looking at him, and I was blowed if I was going to do that. He held a red-and-white checked mug out to me, its cheerful gingham in direct contrast to everything I felt. Rage still purred through my veins: delightful hot fury, as vengeful as lust.
I lashed out. “I said I don’t want it!”
Too quick, he removed the mug from the path of my arm before I hit it.
“I heard what you said,” he said calmly – not the spooky calm of before, but the tranquillity gained from letting go of something that had haunted him for a very long time. “Emma, I want you to drink this and I want you to do so now.”
I scowled at him and he held my gaze, but I couldn’t not do what he told me, even though I resisted with every inch of my being. He raised the mug to me again and this time I took it.
“Gheugh – you’ve put sugar in it!”
“Drink it.”
“Bastard.”
“Yes, but drink it anyway.”
“I didn’t mean the bloody tea.”
“Yes, I know you didn’t.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
He sighed again. I fully intended making his life hell and he knew it.
CHAPTER
16
Complications
There is that province that lies between sleeping and waking in which the tranquillity of the night still reigns before the harsh reality of day begins.
For those few brief moments before I became fully awake, I drifted comfortably in a half-world before the significance of the previous night imposed itself forcibly on my waking mind. My eyes cracked open and for a second I didn’t know where I was. A chilly white ceiling climbed to an apex above my head with heavy wooden beams spanning the space below it. My resting pulse quickened as I remembered, and I jerked fully awake, leaning on one elbow as the fog cleared from my brain. He had put me to bed, still clothed. He had removed my shoes and loosened the waistband of my trousers, but that was all. My eyes and mouth were dry – tacky dry – and a taste clung to my tongue. A glass of water sat by the bed untouched. I lifted it and sniffed, but it smelled as it appeared, and I sipped it once before draining the glass. I strained to listen for any sounds that might tell me where Matthew might be, although what I would do if I saw him was anybody’s guess.
An eddy of conflicting currents obscured my mind – a mass of information recorded in fleeting images and half-remembered words, confused by the chaos of emotion. The yo-yoing between his anger and the threat of violence, and the very real assault on my sensitized emotional state, left me crippled but seething with resentment.
I had been here before.
I hadn’t believed my tutor at first because it was so much easier to pretend that it had all been a ghastly mistake. But she had presented me with the evidence of Guy’s perfidy in the full knowledge that I would first examine the facts. And I did so, picking away at the mortar of our relationship so that, brick by brick, it disassembled before me; she knew it to be the only way I would accept what she told me.
I had crawled back to my room in the old stone college in a state of numbness, before making up my mind what to do with the information. I knew Guy well enough to know that he would have been content to allow things to continue in just the same way they had done before his little secret had been uncovered. I even thought that he would have rather enjoyed the additional titillation it would offer our relationship, especially since I then discovered that I had already met his wife.
She had been at a faculty party at the end of the Michlemas term – a tall, striking woman with dark-brown hair which she tied back from her face, elongating her already fine cheekbones and evening out the first telltale signs of age. She wore a tight-fitting black cocktail dress that showed off her toned legs and bum, and she told me that she ran by the River Cam every morning before taking the children to school. I found her self-assurance quite intimidating – gained, I supposed, from her success as a lawyer, and as wife to a leading academic. My sense of betrayal was as much for her as for me: we were both the unwitting victims of the same man’s ego.
When I told Guy that our relationship was over, I listened to his excuses patiently before telling him exactly what I thought of him. Even then, he persisted – phoning, writing, waiting at the door of my room – until it all became too much and I told my father, because there was no one else in whom I could confide. It left me shattered – bruised enough to jeopardize my studies, but not damaged enough to destroy them.
Despite his protestations of love, there had always been a part of me that reserved judgment on Guy, never quite trusting him as fully as I needed to, but willing myself to believe that I did. That tiny part of me remained invio
late, cushioned from the full force of his deception by my passion for my subject. The journal had been the safety net into which I fell, and my new-found faith plucked me from the tangled mess in which I’d found myself, and put me back on my feet.
This was different. I had given Matthew every ounce of what made me whole; no part of me lay hidden from him and I felt fully exposed to whatever he chose to throw at me. What hurt all the more was that, unlike Guy, he never assumed I was his for the taking. I offered myself on a sacrificial plate, a willing immolation to his fire. Perhaps I had been wrong in supposing he felt the same way I did. Perhaps, because of his old-fashioned manners, I imagined we shared an old-fashioned attitude towards marriage. How stupid! I should have known better.
It snowed viciously now – hard flurries diving, rattling, hissing against the window-wall of the room. Drawing up my legs under the heavy quilt, I attempted to squeeze the gnawing discomfort from inside where all the nervous tension of the day before had taken up residence, and thought about where I would go from here. But there was no point staying in bed and I resented the fact that he had put me there. It had only ever been meant for the two of us and, without him, it made a mockery of my desire. I no longer wanted to be here. I had nothing left to stay for.
Hot water from the tank, heated by the log burner downstairs, flowed into the heavy bath, and I bathed quickly. Had circumstances been different, I would have enjoyed staying at the cabin; as it was, I couldn’t wait to escape.
I couldn’t care less what I wore. I angrily pulled on jeans, and brushed my teeth and hair in the same frame of mind, tying the hair into a rough plait; but that was it – that was all the effort I would make and it sure as anything wasn’t for him.
The faint smell of cooking bacon interrupted my silent tirade. Despite my rancour, I felt hungry; I had missed a meal last night and fallen asleep soon after drinking the tea.
