by Rumer Haven
“You’re out of line.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not. And you don’t even know Gwen, so where do you get off insulting her, offending me in the process?”
“I was just kidding. Sorry if the humor doesn’t translate.” Margot felt out of her body, like she was hovering above, looking down on the scene and helpless to stop herself from making it worse.
“What’s come over you?”
She’d never heard Rand raise his voice before.
“This is getting all blown out of proportion,” she said. “I don’t even know where it started.” Truly, she could hardly remember what she’d said seconds ago, let alone why she would’ve in the first place, like the thoughts and words were self-destructing right along with her. “All I know is, I’m sorry for whatever misunderstanding is occurring right now.”
“No, you’re not,” he repeated. “Margot, in just a matter of weeks, you’ve become a completely different person.”
“What?”
“I realize you’re under some stress and need an outlet, but since when do you direct it at me? Or Gwen, for that matter? You’re volatile.”
The word launched across the room. She had no comeback this time, idiotic or otherwise.
He continued, “It isn’t just tonight.”
She stiffened but remained expressionless.
He evidently took her silence as permission to proceed. “Nothing that you’ve done against me personally. I’ve seen it before and just can’t help but wonder if you’re perhaps…”
Her manner didn’t alter; she didn’t move a hair’s width other than to breathe.
“Well, perhaps at the early stages of…”
She wouldn’t make this easier for him, just watched him press on to complete the sentence.
“…a clinical depression.”
That roused her back to action. Rapidly nodding her head, she said, “Depression. Clinical. That’s your diagnosis.”
“It’s a thought.”
“Based on what, Doctor?”
“Well, this attitude for one. You swing from one extreme to the next. I’m not blaming you. You’ve been through some changes in a fairly short amount of time. What I’m not certain of is whether you’re aware.”
“Evidently not. I thought we’ve been having fun. I thought you enjoyed my company. I stand corrected.”
“Honestly, Margot, this is only recent observation for me. I could sit round and wait for it to get worse or I could address it now. I’m being a friend. I don’t want you to go through what my sister did.”
Margot recalled the family photos on his bedroom dresser, how the recent-looking one was missing the woman she’d assumed was Gwen. She managed a reverent pause before responding, as calmly as she could, “How is she now?”
Rand inhaled, closing his eyes as he did so and then opening them to stare down at his lap. He licked his lower lip. “Not well.” The way he said it communicated clearly enough that, if it was a topic to be pursued at all, it should be in the past tense.
A metallic clatter punctuated Margot’s thoughts. She only just noticed that Rand must have loaded laundry into the washer-dryer situated in the adjoining kitchen.
“When?” she asked. “How old?”
Taking the last question first, “Twenty-four. Going on three years now.”
Margot didn’t desire the details any more than Rand probably wanted to relive them. It sufficed that she could do the math and understand what had brought him back to England those years ago.
“And you think I’m capable of hurting myself.”
The jostling laundry thudded in its spin with clockwork consistency.
“Not at present, no. But then, I hadn’t thought she could either. That she would.” Leather moaned as Rand sank farther back in the sofa, knees spread and fingertips thrumming on the taut armrest. “Look. It’s possible I’m the one overreacting now. It’s clearly something I’m sensitive about, so maybe I’ve misinterpreted—”
“What, exactly? I just don’t see the evidence stacked against me to consider…” Margot couldn’t say it, only hoped that he’d approach his next words just as sensitively.
“Well, to start, I’m tossing out more wine bottles with the recycling, aren’t I? And if you’re not in bed for the evening by eight o’clock most nights, you’re there in the afternoon.”
“What’s wrong with that on a weekend?”
“Weekdays as well.” Before the question could rise to Margot’s mouth, he explained, “Gwen, as you know, doesn’t spend a lot of time here. But she is here, Margot. She has her own keys. She pops in between viewings when in the neighborhood, uses it as a home base to freshen up or use the computer, or just…I don’t know. As it were, she’s been here when you’ve been, and she’s related to me that in the last couple of weeks she’s often seen you sleeping in bed or on the sofa. Or you’re in the bath, talking to yoursel—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” She pumped her palms at him. “No, no, you let me talk. Why have I never received warning that she might, time to time, ‘pop in’ unannounced? And why wouldn’t she assume I was just talking on the phone? And how in hell would she know if I were taking a bath? I know this is your place, Rand, and she’s your girl, but as much as I don’t want to cramp your routine, as long as I am living here and paying to do so, I demand some respect for my privacy.”
The washer hummed with some more clangs as its contents tumbled in the drum.
Rand appeared mystified, his mouth hanging open. “You have received warning. I’ve told you.”
“You have not!”
“I have. Although I question how much you actually hear me when you take on that absent stare of late. Listen. She wasn’t spying on you, Margot. You’re supposed to be away at class. You gave me your timetable, and we’ve observed that because we do respect your privacy. But it’s a small flat. It’s easy to determine when the bathroom is engaged. And when it’s engaged for two hours. She second-guessed at first whether you were, in fact, in there, and out of concern listened at the door. Sometimes she heard you arguing, but other times it was just the sound of water lapping.” He raised a hand that held Margot’s attempted interjection at bay. “It’s fair enough for her to surmise you’re speaking to yourself when she also hears your mobile ring in your bag upstairs, same time.”
“Fine. I have a habit of talking to myself in the mirror when I’m alone. So what. A lot of people do that.”
“I can see that, but what concerns us more are those silent afternoons in the bath. And those were just the hours she was here any given day. She’s never heard running or draining water, so who knows how long those lasted. Could you say?”
A spin cycle began to vibrate the floor.
Margot became intensely interested in her torn cuticles as she spoke. “I enjoy baths once in a while. I get stressed, and, like wine, they relax me.”
“For over two hours.”
“Once in a while.”
“At least twice this week.”
An aggressive hum of acceleration from the kitchen swallowed the room, and the floor trilled.
“I’m an adult entitled to my personal habits,” she replied, still staring at her nails, “and I could care less what you think about it. This is hardly grounds for accusation.”
Finally, she looked him in the eye, in time to see him mutter, “Couldn’t care less,” under his breath.
“What?”
“It’s couldn’t care less,” he repeated. “Otherwise, it would mean you do care.”
She could’ve leapt out of her chair. “Really?”
“Sorry.” He held his palms to her. “What you’ve said is fair enough. But I’m not accusing you of anything, only intervening on the off chance there’s something to it. Is that so terrible? I do apologize if I’m crossing a boundary here, but you’re my tenant, so I feel responsible for you and what may happen to you whilst here.”
The propelling drum whirred with the force of a jet en
gine, like the flat itself was ready to launch.
“Well then, Lord Randolph, as your tenant, I pay my rent in full and on time,” Margot spat. “I’m fulfilling my end of the contract, so what’s anything else got to do with you?”
“I resent your tone.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“No, it isn’t,” Rand retorted sadly. He paused, then sighed, unable to look her in the eye. “Margot, there’s more to this.”
She tilted her head. “And what would that be?”
He matched her hostility as well as his temperament could. “Your diary.”
“What?”
“Your diary. The one you were writing in just now. You’d left it open on the coffee table here, and Gwen couldn’t help but see the large print.” Guilt flittered behind his eyes. “It leapt right off the page. She really wasn’t trying to read it.”
“What?” The first time, Margot honestly hadn’t heard him over the washing machine. This time, though, his message rang clearly.
One of his knees bobbed up and down like a piston as his thumbnail twitched against the underbelly of his middle finger. Margot clawed her armrests.
He slumped. “It was an accident. Honestly. The handwriting was so large, it looked like it was intentionally placed there. Gwen thought it might’ve been a note from me, left for her.”
The washer wound down like a rusted tin toy needing another twist of its key.
Margot’s voice softened as the words caught in her throat. “What did…? How much…?”
Roses bloomed through Rand’s cheeks, and he lowered his gaze. “I don’t remember. Not word-for-word, just…the essence. Please, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Swallowing, she felt the warm, wet streaks down her face. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but…there’s no way I left that book out here. Never brought it out here in the first place, let alone left it wide open.”
“There’s no other explanation for it.”
“Isn’t there?”
Rand squinted. “She wouldn’t have done that.”
“Did you read it, too, or just hear it from her?”
“She told me what she read.”
“And you believed what she told you.”
“Of course I believed her!”
“Of course. It’s just me you don’t.”
“There’s nothing I disbelieve about anything you’ve said, only that you might’ve forgotten you left it out here. I believe, though, that you believe you didn’t.”
“Gee, thanks for that much. That would only mean I’m detached from reality.”
“That’s not—”
“So, what’s the ‘essence’ of what she told you?”
With a sigh, he recited a phrase that sounded even more bizarre coming from a mouth parenthesized by such friendly laugh lines. Margot blinked twice and screwed her face.
“I did not write that,” she said, vaulting from her chair to get her diary and prove it.
She returned just as swiftly as she’d left, rapidly turning the pages as she perused her writing with both conviction and self-doubt.
“These entries are just random notes. Some travels, but mostly dreams, not real life.” She licked her thumb to expedite the page-turning. “I mean, some of these do sound disturbed, but aren’t most dreams?”
She relaxed the more she flipped through the book. She’d scanned every entry she’d ever written, which renewed her confidence that Gwen was talking crap.
Until.
She felt the blood drain from her cheeks as a clammy coolness washed over them. At least a dozen blank pages past her most recent entry revealed some scrawling in her same black ink, but she could hardly recognize the formal cursive. Rand’s paraphrase had been alarming, but the exact words were a horror to actually see.
You have signed my death sentence
and I am to be my own executioner
“What is it? You found it, then? What does it say?” he urged.
Margot played it off weakly. “Oh. Yeah. Now I remember. Weird dream. Totally forgot.”
“It would seem it’s all coming back to you now.”
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat, then swallowed. “It was, uh…distressing.”
She racked her brain for a storyline, using executioner as her springboard.
“I was…standing on a scaffold…taking the fall for a wrongful accusation. I was a man, and the last thing I saw was this woman in the crowd…the same woman I loved was the one to betray me.” Almost as disturbing as the entry was how easily this improv came to her. “And this is what I, as this man, said…to her…still looking at her…just before the blade dropped.”
When her eyes ceased searching the room at the same time she stopped lying, her steadier gaze met Rand’s. He crossed the room to kneel at her feet, folding his hands on her knee like a tragic hero in supplication. But he didn’t say the S word.
That’s how she knew he meant it.
He didn’t say anything, just rested his chin on his knuckles and looked up at her from her lap. Margot didn’t say anything either, only ran her fingers through his hair gently. After a few strokes, he closed his eyes.
For a minute, they remained frozen in this tableau of mutual apology and forgiveness. The sweetness of it almost vanquished the phantom entry from Margot’s mind.
Almost.
IV
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul’s immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a master o’er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie.
From “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
~ William Wordsworth (1815)
Interlude
A Lonely Bed
19th-Century London
I AM AMAZED to find it is not all that long ago on which I look back when I envision myself seated at the dressing table with my lady’s maid, my friend, standing attentively at my side.
The first few weeks had passed since our acquaintance, and so close already was our companionship that, when she consoled me after another wicked argument with Victor, I thought at once that evening—goodness, it was more accurately almost morning!—to consult my jewelry box and select for my friend a gift. I wished for something most fine to symbolize the mutual respect and adoration for one another we had developed, yet all my glistening strands of pearls and twinkling baubles bore the vestige of Victor, he who had first gifted them all to me. Nothing would do.
“If you will permit me,” she whispered as she eased her fingers down into the crevice of her bosom and retrieved from it something small, concealed in her hand.
Having extinguished the wicks on the chiffonier, our sight was aided only by the candlestick on the dressing table, which I normally kept lit out of my nagging fear of darkness. But it, too, then flickered out, though we had already closed the sash to the breezes.
Having procured the mysterious item from its body-heated encasing, she now pressed it into the soft flesh of my palm as she drew me up by my same hand to lead me towards the window. I had left the curtains drawn, so it was by the cooling light of a piercingly white moon that I uncurled my fingers to reveal her treasure: a brooch of sapphire gems and turquoise, with a large, milky pearl nested within its center.
I gaspe
d when I saw it. I know false gems when I spy them, with all the trinkets Mama would flash about. These, however, were not mere paste. Yet she did not snatch the jewels back with greedy misgiving as one might have expected from one of her station. No, she clasped my hand that held the brooch and raised it aloft such that we could both behold it glittering in the moonlight.
Looking from the pearl to the moon, she said, “I shall forever remember this night.”
My eyes began to well then in tears of an entirely different variety than those I had grown so accustomed to shedding; these were tears of a renewed confidence in myself to carry on and accomplish anything to which I aspired from then on, and it would no longer be Victor who supported me but her, in all matters of the soul. If Wordsworth had inspired me to dance with the daffodils, this woman was his poetry in motion.
Perhaps the brooch was not hers to give, however. She, honest soul, granted that. And it was not for me to question how such a girl should come to possess such a fortune, yet she of her own willingness eventually related the tale of how she had acquired the ornament as a child.
I saw her redden as she spoke of her mother, who had served some of her days as a painter’s model to scrape together what earnings she could to raise her child. My dear friend’s father, a drunkard, would disappear days at a time, so she and her mother had grown to count on him for very little.
Too young to be left unsupervised, she had been made to attend her mother’s sittings in the homes of less-than-respectable artists who offered less-than-respectable wages, thus obligating her mother to work with more frequency. There was one painter who described her mother as a “stunner” and so requested her regularly. Whereas other women were sometimes chaperoned for propriety’s sake, my friend’s mother had no one, which was all the more suitable as this artist preferred to work with his models alone. He claimed his work was more inspired this way.
With little to entertain herself in the shadowy corners of his attic, she—my friend, the sole chaperone at an age hardly above five years—could not help but notice her mother’s costume diminish in layers with every appointment. After a time, the child was asked to remove herself to the adjacent room where the models normally undressed.