by C F Dunn
There was something in what he said or the way he said it that made me think there must be more to be said on that subject, but just for once I didn’t press him, and let him carry on.
“The problems started when Henry met Monica. She was… feisty – also very bright – and a few years older than Henry. We hadn’t been in the situation before of having an outsider join our small family; it was a bit of an unknown. Henry, of course, had grown up with me being the way I am; he accepted me because Ellen did and he had known no other life.”
“Monica is no longer alive? You talk about her in the past tense.”
He looked surprised. “Do I? I don’t mean to.” He slid forward from the armchair on which he sat and knelt on one knee in front of the stove. As he opened the glass door, a blast of heat scalded my face even where I sat, several feet away.
“Matthew…!” He looked back over his shoulder at me, a heavy piece of timber in one hand, ready to throw on the fire. The smell of scorching cloth reached me. “You’ll set your clothes on fire!”
He looked down at his chest and brushed his hand over the wool of his sweater.
“Mmm, I’ll have to be more careful.”
“Yes, you will!” I wasn’t supposed to care and, although I assumed him to be fireproof, I didn’t want to test the theory, and the thought of him going up in flames was more than I could cope with at the moment. He threw the log on the fire and closed the door and settled back into his chair. He crossed his legs and placed the tips of his fingers together, looking like a learned professor about to lecture a student. He didn’t say anything for a moment and I thought that he had forgotten what he was saying.
“Monica…?”
“Ah yes, Monica. Henry and Monica had two daughters: little Ellen and Margaret – Maggie. We all lived together in the same house; we had different parts of it, but we shared meals together, that sort of thing. Monica was observant – too observant. She began to ask questions – not only about me, but about Henry also.”
“Why Henry?”
“Henry… how shall I put it?” Matthew paused while he formulated an answer, searching the pine-clad ceiling for words in which to describe his son. “He has some of my attributes, let’s say. He looks like me, for a start, and he hasn’t aged as you would expect.”
“But he is ageing?”
“Yes, he is getting older.” He sounded dejected and for a second looked away. “Anyway, Monica noticed. It was more obvious in me, of course, but then over the years with Henry also, and she started asking questions. When she didn’t get the answers she expected, she searched elsewhere for them.”
“What do you mean, ‘searched’?”
“She consulted scientists, doctors – even clairvoyants. We had to talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t stop. Then there were the girls. They were showing the same signs of not ageing as quickly. Henry had reached his early thirties by that time, but looked at least ten years younger. Then little Ellen, especially, still looked only six or so, when she was ten.”
I thought of Flora wanting to be very grown up at eight. “I bet she didn’t like that.”
“No, not much,” he smiled sadly. “It wasn’t as evident with Maggie – not then, at least. Monica started taking them to doctors to have tests. They hated it – they weren’t guinea pigs, for goodness’ sake, they were just children! Henry tried to stop her but she made life hell for him and she…” I heard a distinct crunch of teeth meeting as Matthew shut his mouth before he said something he might regret. “She became obsessed with the whole concept. Henry said that if she didn’t stop he would take them and leave. But she wouldn’t stop, Emma, she just wouldn’t listen.”
He looked at me and I saw a sliver of the desperation the family must have gone through reflected in his face.
“She must have been jealous,” I said slowly, thinking about the woman.
“Jealous?”
“Well, there you were, looking the way you do, with Henry and her children not ageing much, and then there was she – what, mid to late thirties by then? – wrinkles beginning, stomach starting to sag around the edges, maybe hair beginning to go grey…”
“She was a very striking woman.”
“Perhaps, but she was getting older – you weren’t.”
“Maybe so,” he didn’t sound convinced. “But it was when they were on the way to meet another specialist that the accident happened. Monica was driving, the children were in the back and Ellen had insisted on going with them. I think that she’d used the excuse that she wanted to take the children out for a treat afterwards – something like that. The girls loved ice-cream soda.” His expression softened at the memory, then faded. “Maggie started to cry – needles frightened her, and she was only five. Monica told her to be quiet, Ellen defended her…” He tapered off and I waited until he caught up with himself. “It had been cold overnight; it was still early in the season and the road hadn’t been treated – no snow chains on the wheels either. Monica drove fast – she always drove too fast – and they were late for the appointment. She and Ellen began to argue, the children started crying and… she lost control of the car.” Muscles in his jaw worked, and he hung his head, and quietly, almost so that I couldn’t hear him, said, “I have never spoken of this to anyone outside the family. I haven’t spoken about it for a very long time.”
“I’m so sorry, Matthew,” I whispered, feeling the weight of his sorrow in my chest, and I would have reached out to him, but pride and hurt still bloomed too fulsomely to let me, and I locked my fingers together.
“Yes, well…”
I had nothing useful to say, so I didn’t. Close to the fire, the room seemed warm, but down by the floor where my feet dangled, a layer of cold air hung in an invisible shroud. I kicked off my shoes, tucking my feet under me. If Matthew drank tea – or anything else, for that matter – this would be the point where I would get up and make him a cup. Whatever I thought of him at the moment – and I could feel my resolve waver even as he talked – it would be a small gesture of comfort and a sign that I recognized what he had been through. As it was, I could only sit there in silence without sniping or arguing, and be a token presence of common humanity. I watched him surreptitiously. Composed, grave – the only movement in his face where the light from the fire caught his eyes, imparting an orange flame to their intense blue. Absolutely still, his chest rose and fell imperceptibly, the soft sigh of his breathing neither fast nor slow. Only the incessant twisting of the ring on his little finger gave any indication of what he experienced in the recollection of that day. Careless of the moment, my tummy rumbled and his eyes refocused on me.
“It’s your lunchtime; you must have something to eat.”
“It hardly matters, Matthew; it can wait.”
A slight smile lifted the corner of his mouth and vanished as quickly.
“I promised your mother that I would make sure you ate properly, so…”
“My mother isn’t here,” I interjected.
“I always try and keep my promises, Emma,” he said pointedly. Reluctantly, I started to slip my shoes back on, but he rose and went through to the kitchen. He must have given some thought to how I would be fed while we were together; I had given it none.
“I can feed myself, you don’t have to do anything,” I said, following him, aggrieved. He glanced at me, then back at the shelves and the assortment of food in the cold store set in the outer wall that acted as a fridge in winter.
“It’s not something I’ve been able to do for a long time. Let me at least make sure you eat, if nothing else.”
Part of me still baulked at letting him do anything that might take away the sting of his confession – might make me almost beholden to him. But this wasn’t manipulation or even a salve for his conscience, but exactly what it seemed, so I let him.
“Did you do this for your wi— for Ellen?”
He selected several items and brought them to the work-surface under the long kitchen window.<
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“Yes – sometimes, when work permitted or she let me; husbands weren’t supposed to be self-sufficient then. But I’m quite domesticated, you know. Even if I have no need for food, I like to think that I can look after others.”
Since he wasn’t going to let me cook, I did the washing up from breakfast. Matthew showed me how to run hot water from the system heated by the wood stove. It ran erratically, and he hastily pulled me out of the way as scalding water hissed and spat into the deep sink.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“You’re welcome,” he said and again, the hint of a short-lived smile. I watched him curiously as he chopped various vegetables and trimmed meat. He seemed more at home with food than I did. I washed and dried the plate, knife, fork and various cooking implements from the morning, and he took them from me and put them away.
“Have you been here before?” I asked.
“The cabin belongs to Henry. We all use it from time to time.”
The mention of his son reminded me of something I had meant to ask.
“Did you call him after your father?”
Matthew threw a handful of vegetables into hot fat and the moisture in them exploded furiously.
“Henry after my father, little Ellen after Ellen and Maggie after my mother.”
“Yes, of course,” I murmured, recalling his family tree. “Then the medical centre was named after your granddaughter; I thought it was after your… wife.”
“Of course – that’s what you were supposed to think – you and everyone else. The lies go far beyond you, Emma. My existence is one big fabrication; it’s the only way I know to keep us safe.”
He stirred the sautéing vegetables rapidly before moving them to a plate he kept on one side. He replaced them with a piece of meat. I looked at it doubtfully.
“Don’t worry, it’s not liver.”
I looked at him in surprise. “How do you know I don’t like liver?”
“I asked your mother.”
“Oh.”
The smell of seared meat rose temptingly from the griddle, making me salivate.
I found it difficult to maintain a frosty distance with any dignity with my stomach intent on showing me up, so I tried to cover my growling hunger by cleaning the emptying sink noisily. Matthew obligingly ignored my embarrassment. Scrubbing at a tough spot, I returned to the original conversation.
“If Monica dug around for information, did she find anything incriminating?” Matthew moved the meat around on the griddle to stop it from catching.
“No, not that I’m aware. She left shortly after the accident – the marriage couldn’t hold together after that. Henry was understandably devastated by the death of his daughter – we all were – and with his five-year-old daughter to care for and his mother in a critical state…” I had ceased cleaning, finding myself involuntarily drawn into the family’s ordeal, watching it played out in the narration of his face. “I… I didn’t know if Ellen would make it for some time after the accident, Emma. We were living on a knife edge for months. But what was worse – so much worse – was losing a child to the certainty of death.” He flipped the meat over with more force than he needed.
Mopping up spattered fat, I said quietly, “But your wife did survive.”
“If you can call it survival, then yes, I suppose she did. And so did Maggie – thankfully, with no more than minor injuries – physical, at least. The cruel irony of it is that only Monica remained unscathed. The car left the road over a shallow cliff and rolled. It was prevented from falling any further by a tree, but it hit it pretty hard on Ellen’s side and little Ellie sat behind her. Damn, I’ve burned this.” He took the griddle from the stove top, scowling at the steak which looked only singed along one edge; it wasn’t what I would have called burned.
“It doesn’t matter, Matthew; it’s better than I would have cooked it.”
I also wanted to say that I wasn’t as hungry as I had been before he told me the details of the accident, and that eating after he had told me about what happened to his family seemed callous; but he placed the meat on the plate and spooned the vegetables next to it and set it on the table, standing expectantly with his arms folded. I resigned myself to eating and sat down.
I ate in the silence that followed as Matthew went to check the generator that pumped hot water to the bathrooms and to the kitchen tap, and I took in the essence of the crash. As much as I tried not to, the scene replayed over and over, and from the twisted remains of the car I saw the lifeless gaze not of the blonde-wreathed woman I had seen that first day in Maine, but of a little girl. In my mind’s eye, her grandfather bent over her, covered her bare legs, and closed her eyes for the last time. Tenderly – because she mattered; because he cared.
Nothing could erase the memory of the crash scene I witnessed that September day when first I saw him, nor disassociate those events with what happened to his family forty years previously. It glued itself to my psyche as surely as it had left its mark on Matthew, and part of me resented the fact that – despite myself – I cared.
I cut a thin strip from the meat and added a tiny cube of potato to the end of the fork without thought. It required none. Routine offered respite: eating, drinking, breathing. Minute by minute, familiarization granted some relief from the devastating effects of his revelation. Like a tectonic shift in my life, the initial shock had been an earthquake that shook me to my very core, so violent that I found it hard to isolate any single emotion among the onslaught to my senses. Then, after the numbing first blow, the aftershocks had struck, rolling one emotion in after another: anger, grief, shame. Now I thought myself at the point where finally, after the turmoil, comes calm, and I might be able to stand back and take stock. Only then would I be in a position to determine what needed to be done and what I wanted to do about it. I remained acutely aware, however, that occasionally a tremor ran through me, reminding me that, although the main danger had receded, it left in its wake a bruised and battered spirit that would take time to heal.
I had always been jealous of Ellen, of the power of her status as wife and her pull on Matthew’s memory. I understood it better now – my envy made flesh in the form of a frail and vulnerable old woman. Even if Matthew were willing to disavow her, I couldn’t have lived with the guilt and it would condemn him further in my eyes, and there was no future for us in that.
Future.
A word made redundant by the facts. A false hope because, as Matthew said, he wasn’t going to leave her, and the wedding ring he still wore declared as much.
But he had also said that he wouldn’t let me go.
Left once again in a state of limbo – neither here nor there, neither one thing nor the other – I floundered. He said that he would give me all the information I needed to make an informed choice, but all the information in the world wouldn’t alter the fact that he remained married. So my choice seemed to be limited to accepting the status of friend – I cringed at the thought – or leaving. The latter would mean cutting all ties, severing the knot that bound us, never seeing him again because – if I knew one thing about myself – once a decision like that had been made, I would not go back on it.
When I left Guy, I did so completely. Except when he turned up outside my door, or telephoned in the middle of the night, I had nothing more to do with my former lover. I refused to speak to him, I didn’t answer his letters and, when he loitered at the back of the lecture hall, I left by another exit. The only time I voluntarily spoke to him since making the decision was when I visited him in hospital. No half measures.
So what terrified me now was not so much what I would decide to do, but the thoroughness with which I would do it, leaving me no way back. It made the choice that much harder, and so, with this in mind, I had to keep talking, keep delaying the decision, put it off for as long as possible until my way became clear, or a decision was made for me.
I had fallen into a reverie, lost so deep in my own thoughts that I failed to notice Matthew had n
ot returned. I went upstairs, but felt his absence. The blizzard still swarmed outside and, even given the vantage point of the bedroom window, I could see no further than ten feet into the storm through the distorting anarchy of snow. Then I heard the door shut downstairs.
I slowed when I reached the head of the stairs and descended at a measured pace as if I hadn’t detected him gone. I allowed myself to look at him when I reached the bottom step; caked in snow, he stood in the porch brushing himself down, his cream sweater now white, his hair rigid ice.
“Where have you been?!” I exclaimed without thinking.
He looked faintly amused. “I wouldn’t have thought you would mind; I went out to the woodpile.”
Evidence lay in a load of logs on the floor behind him. Caught caring and thrown off guard, I bent to pick up the timber, but he moved to take it from me, and snow fell in slushy lumps on the polished floor.
“Wait – you’ll get snow everywhere,” I fussed, pushing him back into the porch.
He grunted a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
He cast a quick glance at me. “You sounded just like my wife.”
It was the wrong thing to say and at the wrong time. “Well, I’m not,” I said sharply, then drew a breath when I saw the hurt flash in his eyes and moderated my tone. “You’re soaking, you’d better get changed.”
When I said “changed”, I expected him to go upstairs; instead, he pulled his sweater over his head in one go, capturing the snow within the folds of the fabric. I wasn’t prepared for the effect that simple, unconscious act had on me, but it must have registered in my face because Matthew looked at me curiously. He wore a T-shirt which revealed the breadth of his shoulders and the well-developed musculature of his upper body to which the material clung. I blushed immediately and turned away, furious with myself. Blast it, he was making this harder and harder. I had almost succeeded in persuading myself that the physical attraction he exuded – and to which I responded all too readily – was safely under control. When I sneaked a look at him again, he shook melting ice out of his hair, his muscles flexing with each movement. I retreated rapidly to the kitchen to put the kettle on the range, standing by it as the water heated and I cooled. It maddened me that I couldn’t be sure if he knew the effect he had on me. What I found even more galling in the current situation, was that I did.
