by C F Dunn
“NO!”
I realized now what the strange taste in my mouth had been when I woke. By the time I made it downstairs, I had worked myself into a fury and I knew who would get the brunt of it.
“You drugged me!” I accused him as soon as I stalked into the kitchen.
Matthew continued to break an egg into the griddle on the stove. It spat as the hot fat cooked the edges of the white, crisping them a friable gold. Strips of bacon kept warm on a plate next to the griddle.
“I sedated you; you were in a pretty bad state.”
“I was angry – there was nothing wrong with me.”
He spooned hot fat over the egg, the transparent white becoming opaque in an instant.
“You were distraught, you needed to rest.”
“That was not your decision to make.”
My fists clubbed as I readied myself for the fight. He looked at me for the first time, the blue of his irises intensified by the white of the snow outside and the cream sweater he wore.
“I rather think it was.”
He remained infuriatingly calm, and returned to the task in front of him. I wanted to shake him, abuse him, reduce him to a writhing mass of black spite, as he had done to me – anything to get a reaction which would justify me hating him.
“What are you doing that for – you don’t eat,” I said rudely.
He refused to be goaded, placing the cooked egg precisely on the plate next to the bacon.
“No, but you do.”
He held the plate out to me, but I stood there like a spoilt, stubborn child, my arms stiff by my sides, glaring at him.
“Emma, it’s not much, eat it – you can argue with me as much as you like afterwards.”
I snatched it from him, detesting my behaviour as much as I hated him. I slammed the plate on the table where already a knife and fork lay next to a slate place mat, hearing the satisfying chink of porcelain on stone. If I tried again a little harder, the fine china would disintegrate into as many pieces as he had broken me. Matthew watched as I picked up the knife and fork reluctantly – fighting my hunger – and then turned his back to allow me to swallow my pride and eat.
As I finished the last piece of bacon, he placed the mug in front of me, taking the empty plate away. I eyed it suspiciously.
“It’s just tea, Emma.”
He had the patient tone that adults adopt when dealing with a disgruntled child, but the food had taken the edge off my temper, despite myself. I was still up for a fight though, if he offered me one.
“That’s what I thought it was last night.” I took a sip anyway; he’d remembered not to sugar it, but then he wasn’t trying to disguise the taste as he had yesterday. “Now what happens? Is this where you tell me that your wife doesn’t understand you, or that you were going to leave her anyway?”
He had been in the process of cleaning the work surface, but now he turned slowly, leaned against the kitchen sink and folded his arms, regarding me sombrely.
“No, I won’t leave her.”
Now, why did that not surprise me? I gave a snort of a laugh.
“So, what do you want from me – do you expect me to be your mistress?”
I couldn’t disguise the bitterness in my voice and he heard it, too.
“No.”
I stared at him, wavering between hurt and rage. For all the protestations I made over Guy and his marriage, there had been the tiniest part of me that hoped – even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself – that Matthew and I could still be together in some way. I felt another door slam in my face and my temper began to blaze from desperation.
“What, then? If you won’t leave her and you don’t want me to be your whore, I take it that you don’t want me at all. You went to all that trouble to fetch me back from the UK and to bring me up here, to tell me that? You could have saved yourself the bother and told me a long time ago; then I wouldn’t need to be here.” Heat flooded my face. “Actually, you could have saved us all the time and trouble and not have spoken to me in the first place. Why did you do it? I was perfectly happy before I met you; why couldn’t you just have left me alone, Matthew?”
A sudden gust of wind sucked at the chimney; inside the log burner, the flames stretched and flared, licking the glass.
“I told you once that I’m selfish. I didn’t set out to fall in love with you; I tried not to…”
“You didn’t try very hard,” I snapped.
“I tried hard enough, believe me.”
“After this? Why the hell should I?”
I found his quietude disturbing. “Because you love me as much as I love you.”
“Don’t bet on it,” I hissed.
Matthew fixed me with his unwavering gaze, his head tilted slightly to one side. I felt as trapped by his eyes as a butterfly inside a jar. He spoke quietly.
“Are you telling me that you don’t love me, Emma?”
I wanted to scream at him that I didn’t love him, that I hated him, that I loathed the very sight of him, but why should he believe me if I couldn’t even convince myself? So I didn’t answer and looked sullenly at the grain of the table instead. With a slight movement of his hips, he pushed himself away from the sink and came around the side of the table, standing within a few feet of me. I felt his nearness like an open wound. I glared at him.
“There’s no point in discussing any of this any more – it’s all a farce, a total farce. Why couldn’t you have just told me the truth to begin with? Why wait until now?”
“Would you have stayed if I did?”
I looked away, avoiding his eyes.
He answered for me. “You’d already made it perfectly clear that you wouldn’t date a married man, and at what point would I draw the line and start telling you the truth? How would you have reacted if I turned around one day and said, ‘Hey, Emma, I’m married, oh, and by the way, I’m four hundred years old and should be dead.’ Would you really have been able to cope with that?”
The wind gasped and moaned down the chimney. Outside the snow had thickened until the closest trees were entirely obscured by the sheer mass of it. Even if I told him to take me back to the college, we wouldn’t be able to leave now, which made the situation all the more intolerable because I had no choice but to bear it. I looked back at him.
“So instead, you made sure I was well and truly hooked before I found out, is that it? Was that part of your game plan?”
“I had no plan. I didn’t want to make things difficult for you, but I couldn’t let you go. I won’t live without you, Emma.” He meant it as a declaration but it came out almost as a threat. I narrowed my eyes.
“So you said. Hah! You’ve not much choice, have you? You’ve certainly not given me any. Does your wife know you’ve been cheating on her?”
He flinched as if I’d struck him, taking a step back from me.
“It’s more complicated than that and yes, she does know about us.”
Incredulity followed scorn and I half stood up, shaking my head in disbelief, and leaning my hands on the table lest he conclude that my trembling limbs were anything other than unqualified rage.
“You stand there and tell me that she knows? You have the audacity to tell me that she knows, yet you won’t leave her? And she’s happy with this little arrangement? What, do you cuddle up at night and tell her all about it – all about me? Does she find it funny – do you both have a really good laugh at my expense? Or does the whole idea of it turn you both on?” Through my anger my voice began to break. He reached out to me, torment on his face.
I pulled back sharply. “Don’t touch me – don’t you dare touch me.”
He kept his hand out, imploring. “Emma, let me explain, please; it’s nothing like you think…”
Without the prop of the table I began to shake uncontrollably, as disappointment, rancour and despair combined with pungent humiliation.
“Think? I don’t know what to think, Matthew, because you never told me.”
He took anoth
er step towards me.
“I’m telling you now – I’m telling you everything now. Please, just listen.”
CHAPTER
17
Aftershock
As the wind rose to scream at us through the crazed window, Matthew ran his hands through his hair, preparing to begin.
“The car crash didn’t kill her…”
“That’s obvious,” I sneered.
“But it left her – Ellen’s – spine broken. She’s been quadriplegic ever since.”
Intent on my vendetta, there was nothing he could tell me now that would weaken my resolve to detest him.
“And that’s your excuse – cheat on your disabled wife. Oh, this gets better and better; you are a monster after all.”
That hurt; his mouth turned down and I could sense the tremor run through him, but he didn’t stop.
“That’s not all; the crash that paralysed her, killed our granddaughter.”
I bit my lip; I could feel my resolve to hate everything about him weakening.
“Don’t try the sympathy card on me, Matthew.”
“I’m not telling you to gain your sympathy, Emma; I’m telling you so that you know all the circumstances. What you decide to do with the information will be up to you; but you need to listen – you owe me that much.”
“I owe you nothing,” I said sourly.
“Yes – you do. Did you hear what I said? I told you that our granddaughter died.”
It finally registered.
“When?”
“Forty-six years ago.”
“But that means…”
His voice dropped as he watched for my reaction. “Yes, what does it mean?”
He let me work it out for myself, just as my tutor did all those years ago in Cambridge.
“But… how old is she?”
“Ellen was born in 1914.”
“She’s…”
“Ninety-six, yes.”
My pulse stammered into life as my curiosity gained the better of me.
“Is she the same as you? I mean, is she immortal – or whatever you are?”
“No, she’s the same as you, Emma – she will die.” Whether he meant to or not, he shuddered. “I cannot excuse what I have done to you, but I have not betrayed my wife. Whatever you might think of me now, that’s one thing of which you cannot accuse me.”
“So what do you call this?” I indicated the cabin with an angry glance around the room.
“Ellen knows we are here, and she knows why we are here. It was her idea in the first place; she insisted that I tell you.”
“Matthew, this is sick.”
He closed his eyes and his mouth drew into a thin line that hardened.
“I said that I would tell you everything; I didn’t say it would be easy. Heaven knows I have sought every – any – way to make this easier, but the facts are what they are.”
Shoving the chair away from me with my foot, I stood back from the table.
“I don’t know what’s worse: thinking you’re cheating on your wife, or that she is complicit. Damn it, Matthew, she’s ninety-six – she’s older than my grandmother. Ugh!”
I went over to the broken window, ignoring the frigid air, and looked out as far as the blizzard would allow. I had already worked out that she must be older than he looked, but it never occurred to me that she would be that old. Yet – why not? After all, Matthew was four times her age and I hardly recoiled from him.
“What else is there – what else haven’t you told me?”
Snow spat at the window; behind me, Matthew shifted position and took a deep breath.
“We have a son – Henry – and…”
“Henry is your son?”
“Yes, and Daniel is my grandson…”
“Not your brother.”
“No. And Maggie is our granddaughter. Her sister was killed in the same crash that paralysed my wife.”
I felt cold by the window and goosebumps crawled up my arms despite the thick jumper I wore. But I could hardly tell whether the ice that replaced the fire in my veins was the result of the air, or the leaching of hope that bled from me.
“Emma, please come away from there, come by the fire.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re getting cold. There’s no point making yourself suffer.”
“No, you’ve done enough of that for me.”
“Yes, and it has to stop. No more lies, Emma; I don’t want to keep anything from you any more.”
I couldn’t resist the temptation to resort to sarcasm.
“But I might run, Matthew – aren’t you frightened that I might run? Doesn’t it bother you that I might leave? It worried you before – what’s changed?”
A note of resignation sounded in his voice.
“As you said last night, where would you go? I know that I have nowhere; we are as tied to each other as we are to this earth. And besides, I can’t keep you without letting you go.”
I turned around to face him squarely. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It means that I have to let you make the choice whether you stay or go, and you can’t do that if you don’t know what to base that decision on.”
Echoes of the argument I’d had with my father filtered back to me, and then another conversation – one that Matthew and I held as he cared for me in his room at the college after Staahl’s attack – when I felt equally confused but knew so much less about him than I did now.
“Complications, Matthew; this is what you meant, isn’t it, when you said there were ‘complications’?”
“Yes.”
I came back to stand in front of the fire, but it made little difference to the cold inside me, and with a grudging degree of acquiescence I said, “You had better tell me the rest of it.”
“It’s complicated,” he warned, frowning again.
“Everything about you always is,” I told him, unsmiling, giving him nothing but the time to explain.
“I met Ellen in 1933. She was nineteen and the sister of Jack – one of the athletic team – and I stayed with her family on their ranch when we were in training one season.”
I pictured him with a pretty young girl in the wheat-fields of some prairie in the Midwest and felt instantly and insanely jealous. I pressed my hands together in my lap and said nothing.
“We grew to like one another and married the following spring. Henry came along several years after.”
The thought of Matthew with anyone else galled me. I reminded my green-eyed self that I wasn’t supposed to care, remonstrating with my alter ego for my inconsistency. But it was pointless. I pulled my cross from the confines of my jumper and rasped it angrily from side to side on its chain. Matthew had been observing me closely and, although I glared fixedly at the white-hot heart of the fire, from where I sat I saw the flash as his eyes lit at my poorly disguised envy. He pressed the advantage before I recovered, finding a crack in my defences.
“Emma, I was lonely – I’d had centuries of being alone – and Ellen allowed me to feel human for the first time in countless years. I could share some sort of normality with her, something of which I had been only able to dream.”
I crossed my legs and leaned an elbow on my knee, swinging the cross back and forth tetchily, more angry with myself at this moment, than with him.
“Did she know about you – did you tell her?”
Matthew shook his head. “No, I didn’t, not at first. She knew I was strong and fast, of course – she liked that – but not how strong, nor how fast. She always worried that I didn’t eat enough – that was more difficult to hide – but not impossible.” His voice became faraway and I felt the thrill of envy crawl through me again.
“Things were fine between us until after the war. I served as a medic again – wars are useful for creating enough confusion to lose oneself in all the paperwork; but when I came back, she noticed the difference in me.”
“How?”
&nbs
p; “Because I hadn’t changed. I stayed on in Europe to help with the privations after the end of the war, so I’d been gone for some time. All the other husbands and sons returned scarred in one way or another – emotionally or physically and sometimes both – but I remained unchanged. And not only that, but I looked as young as I did when I went away.”
Although I resisted, I could feel myself being drawn inexorably into the story of his life.
“How did you explain it to her?”
“Well…” He ran his hands through his hair again, making the gold strands stick up haphazardly before he repeated the action, smoothing them back. “I did and I didn’t. Ellen didn’t have the advantage of your education nor your perception, so I kept my background and my real age to myself.”
I stopped sliding my cross and stared at him.
“She doesn’t know where you come from? Still?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I never told her; I didn’t think she would cope with it, I thought she might…”
“Run,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”
“But she must have noticed over – however many years you’ve been married…”
“Of course she knows,” he interrupted. “She’s not as educated as you are, but she’s sharp, intelligent.”
“I didn’t mean to imply she wasn’t,” I said defensively; “just that she must have asked sooner or later.”
“Sorry.” He drew his hand across his eyes, a gesture he always made when confronted with something that made him uneasy. “Yes, she did. I told her that something had happened during the war – a nerve agent or some such nonsense – that had slowed the ageing process.”
“And she accepted that?”
“Yes. Whether she believed me is another matter; but she accepted what I told her. I think that it was either that or face making a choice.”
“Which was?”
“To stay or go.”
“Oh, that one.”
He threw an almost haunted look at me and I returned it stonily. He dropped his gaze and continued.
“We were happy enough together; Henry was growing up and we had a home – although we had to move every so often – and financially we were very comfortable. She stayed.”
