by C F Dunn
Matthew watched while I emptied the chest of drawers. “There’s nothing to worry about. Ellie says the reporters gave up and left. They’re more interested in the big fraud case in Portland and I’m glad to say you’re old news.”
“I’m history – is that it?” I said, thrusting a delicate jumper into my bag. Matthew took it out and refolded it carefully before replacing it.
“As I said, nothing to worry about. Of course, if you stayed here, there would be no such concerns.” He stood close behind me, his hands on my hips, his mouth to my ear so his warm breath tickled. Swallowing temptation, I freed myself from his embrace.
“And I wouldn’t get any work done. I’ve so much to organize and you’re too much of a distraction to have around. May, Matthew – that’s only weeks before the conference. How am I supposed to get a wedding organized by May in a foreign country and finish my work for the conference!”
“May gives us plenty of time. Only yesterday you were complaining that you wouldn’t have any say in the matter with Pat and your family getting involved in the arrangements. We can make a start next weekend in New York.”
“Yes, but…”
“No buts, May. We agreed last night, didn’t we – remember?”
I warmed with the memory. “You took advantage of me; you had me in a compromising position.”
He caught me up, laughing. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? No second thoughts?”
“None.” I kissed him. “None at all.”
There was still one outstanding matter I needed to confront before I left the security of his home and faced reality. Pat sat alone at her dining room table surrounded by books and magazines when I went to see her later that evening.
“My, you’re looking better – quite recovered. I was just searching for some English recipes for your wedding feast. I’m so glad you’ve decided to get married here. We can make it such an occasion, although I expect your parents will be disappointed not to see you married from your home. How have they taken it?”
“I haven’t told them yet, Pat.”
“No? Will you soon?” By that she meant, “You will tell them soon, won’t you?”
“Yes, I will, when I get back to campus.” And I’d survived whatever I might find there. Notwithstanding reporters and my students, I had the potential Shotter problem to sort out. “Actually, Pat, I wondered if Henry might be about?”
She examined me over the rim of her spectacles. “Henry? Yes, why sure he is; he’s in the observatory. You’ll need a torch and a warm coat if you’re going out there.”
Tucked away to the south-west of the Barn and hidden by a rise in the land, I followed my nose and the faint imprint of Henry’s footfall until I found the pale dome of his observatory glowing under the starlit sky. He must have heard the snap of my footsteps in the broken snow because he didn’t look surprised when he opened the door to my knock. Either that or he had been expecting me.
“Emma, come in.” Muffled in a deeply quilted coat, he looked warm, with only his fingers exposed at the tips in fingerless gloves. He smiled in welcome, but with an unaccustomed restraint.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Henry.”
“Not at all. It’s not much warmer in here, I’m afraid. Come and sit down.” He pulled out a stool on castors and waited until I sat before going over to a squat metallic tube on tripod legs resembling a mortar launcher, taller than him by a half-head.
I didn’t know where to begin. I had rehearsed what I wanted to say, but now that it came to it, it sounded inadequate, so I rammed my hands in my pockets and said nothing. Henry squinted down the eyepiece. I had to start somewhere.
“I’ve never seen a telescope like that, Henry.” Wow, that sounded lame.
He straightened. “It’s a sixteen-inch reflector, the best I’ve had. This is a good place for an observatory – free of light-pollution and with a clear aspect. I’ll be sorry when we leave.” I heard resignation in his voice and I wondered if Matthew had already broached the subject with him, and whether he saw me as the reason for leaving. He bent over the telescope again. “Are you interested in astronomy, Emma?”
I studied the domed interior lit by subdued red light: the computer, the shiny surfaces, the glass – so far removed from the wood and brass of my grandfather’s telescope and deep night skies smoked by the foxed glass of the lenses. “My grandfather had an old Ross telescope we used to take out into the Fens sometimes, though we weren’t able to see much through it.” It wasn’t why I liked going. I could spend hours alone with him and away from home, when he would tell me all about the early days of the Royal Society and the astounding discoveries that had silently shaken the world. I smiled at the memory. “I’m more interested from a historical point of view and how people believed the planets influenced their lives, but I’m afraid I’m totally ignorant in every other respect.”
“And what do the stars tell you about your marriage to my father?” His candid question caught me off balance and I found him looking at me with a cloaked expression.
“I’m sorry it’s so soon after Ellen’s death, Henry. We would have waited, but…” I chewed my lip, unsure how to continue now that it came to it.
“In the circumstances you didn’t want to wait? No, I can understand that, and my father would want to do right by you in any case, but there’s still a part of me that wonders if my mother’s memory has been… discarded.” I stared in horror and he smiled sadly. “I know that isn’t the case, Emma; it’s just my grief talking. Don’t take any notice of an old man. I need a little time to adjust. I’d known my mother all my life, you see, and, although I thought I’d prepared for her death, I think a part of me believed she would never die. She’d been on the verge of it so many times, and so many times Dad brought her back. But not this time – this time he wasn’t there to save her.” No, he had been at my trial giving evidence for me.
“There was nothing he could do, Henry,” I said quietly, but we both knew that Matthew could have been there, would have been there, but for me.
“He was where he needed to be, Emma, we all were. Ellen would have been the first to say it if she could. That’s one thing of which you could never accuse my mother – there wasn’t an ounce of sentimentality about her, always straight to the point.”
“I remember,” I said, thinking of the meeting we’d had in the weeks before she died, needle sharp to the point of cutting, stalwart – hard perhaps – and certainly not soft, but for all of that, not unkind either.
He grunted a laugh. “I’m sure you do; she’s not easy to forget. You saw her after many years of struggling to maintain a family against some hard odds. She couldn’t do that without adopting coping strategies. She wasn’t always a tough old bird, Emma – life made her like that.”
“Do you blame Matthew?”
Henry took longer to answer than I hoped he needed. He spent some time making tiny adjustments to the instrument in front of him. Finally he tapped at a computer keyboard on a bench. “Dad did everything he could to make things easier for her, but he couldn’t change the circumstances in which they found themselves, or those that are peculiar to him. My parents stayed together through thick and thin. It wasn’t easy for Ellen, especially after the war. You know about that, I suppose?”
“A little. Matthew mentioned it.”
“Yes, I thought as much.” A tiny whirr from the tripod distracted him. He watched it for a moment. “That’s the automatic tracking device, it saves fiddling about – not like the telescopes I was brought up with.” I shifted and waited. “Ellen was an old woman when you met her – old and sick and tired – but she wasn’t always like that. She had been young and vibrant until the crash that crippled her. She stuck by my father like glue, although it must have been very hard for her. She didn’t shed a tear when he was away at war and not even when the news came of my Uncle Jack’s death; she just went into herself and mourned alone. I suspect she didn’t want to scare me. I wasn’t very old at the time, but I remember i
t as clearly as I do yesterday.” He raised his eyes to mine – his father’s eyes but for the contact lenses he used to disguise their colour. “I’ve thought a great deal about those days recently. You know, I don’t recall her crying until my father came home and she discovered he was just the same as when he went away. Those few months were the hardest – harder perhaps even than after the crash. I woke one night, a few weeks after he returned, and I heard her raised voice. I’d never heard her shouting before and I crept to the landing. I had to be so quiet or she would have skinned me if she’d caught me out of bed.” He shook his head at the memory. “I sat there and listened. I could see her below and she was so angry – angry and upset – and wound up like a spring, shaking with fury. She kept saying repeatedly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’re different, Matthew? Why didn’t you tell me?’”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything – not at first. He looked haunted, to tell you the truth, as if his worst nightmare had come true. I didn’t know then that he still hadn’t told her the whole truth. It wasn’t until later that I learned that he’d kept it from her. He told her it was the effects of a new nerve agent.”
“He was trying to protect her.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve never known my father do anything maliciously and the truth would have been too much for her. I didn’t understand that then, of course, and my first instinct was to protect my mother. In my childish simplistic way he had made her cry and I couldn’t forgive him for that, not at first – not until I was older and he told me. I must have hurt him deeply and I haven’t quite forgiven myself for that.” I sensed a wash of remorse shading him plum. So that’s what the colour of guilt looked like.
“He’s never mentioned it. Matthew’s so proud of you.”
“And I of him. It’s only as the years have passed that I’ve come to realize what he must have gone through, and even so, I wonder at times what he hasn’t told me, what more there is to know.” I held his gaze, wondering if he could read the obfuscation in my eyes, but he turned away at last and leant over the telescope. “I must have been a difficult teenager. I went through a rough patch at school. I didn’t know why, of course, but the other kids picked up on my differences and I made my father’s life hell for a time. I blamed him for everything. Then one night – a night not unlike this one – when I was being particularly foul, he took me outside and started to show me the constellations. He told me that they have been a constant through all the ages of Man and how, long after we have gone, they will be there still. Then he told me that he was different and that I had inherited those differences and that he was sorry for all the pain he put me through. Him causing me pain!” He bowed his head and I felt his palpable regret. I touched his arm and he briefly laid his gloved hand over mine. “For the first time in years I let him talk and was prepared to listen. He must have guessed I was ready to hear what he had to say and I only wish I’d been able to before. But, there you go – that’s kids for you.” He seemed to be finding something particularly absorbing through the telescope, or perhaps he found the subject of his youth difficult to talk about.
“Is that when you became interested in astronomy?” I rubbed my hands together to get some warmth to the tips.
“It took me out of myself, away from all that I thought I knew and understood. Dad opened a whole new world for me to explore. He bought me a telescope, taught me how to map the stars, to use them to navigate. I came to understand myself and to accept and respect him. It opened my eyes to how much he knew, and even now he sometimes surprises me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Heh, for years I thought he might be an alien! That was in the ’fifties when such things were all the rage the first time around. We still don’t know what he is for sure, do we, Emma?” His voice dropped and I suspected he was asking me.
“No, I don’t know why he is as he is, Henry. Nor does he, but he keeps looking, doesn’t he? You all do – it’s what he bases his research on. He wants to find a cure for his condition.” I had allowed a harsh note to creep into my voice and Henry looked at me in surprise.
“But that’s not the whole story, Emma. It’s true Dad wants to know what made him that way, but his work goes far beyond helping himself. He’s spent years working on ways to alleviate pain in patients and to halt the progression of certain diseases. He’s used himself as a guinea pig more times than I can count. It’s his research that’s pioneered some of the most important breakthroughs. You won’t hear his name in the news – you know why he avoids publicity at all costs – but he’s behind it, you can be sure of it.”
I had been so caught up in our time-limited future together that I hadn’t looked beyond it. Matthew’s work remained largely unknown to me, and I had made assumptions based on my fear. Could he have commanded respect from people like Matias and Sung if all that concerned him was his own mortality?
Henry broke through my ruminations. “Ah, now that’s a rare sight indeed! Come and have a look at this.” I joined him and looked through the eyepiece. What I saw stole my breath.
“That’s beautiful! I’ve never seen a planet so clearly!”
“Isn’t it wonderful? It’s Saturn in a phase where the rings are at a very shallow angle and you can see the transit of the moons. Remarkable. Matthew will want to see this.” He picked up a phone lying to one side, but didn’t dial. “Emma, what I said earlier – I’m sorry how it sounded. I’ve known since Dad met you that he would marry you one day if he could, and a part of me still wishes that my parents could have had the same relationship you seem to have. It’s as if he’s been waiting for you all this time and that hurts as their son. But, for what it’s worth, I’m glad he’s happy and I’m glad it’s you – despite the age difference.” His mouth creased upwards, making him look like an older version of his father.
I returned his smile. “Henry, he loved and respected Ellen, as he does her memory. I’m not capable of replacing her even if I wanted to, just as the woman who will one day take my place will be a person in her own right.” His eyes broadened at my frankness. “I couldn’t ask Matthew to live on his memories alone; they are not enough to sustain him. He needs to belong as much as we do. I will die one day as surely as Ellen has. We might not like it, but history will repeat itself. However many years down the line it might be, perhaps my successor will be having this same conversation with my son or daughter.”
Henry fell silent for a moment. “So you think he will live that long?” he said quietly, and I mentally thumped myself when I remembered that he believed Matthew to be no more than a century old and hadn’t thought in terms of immortality and that, in his mind, his father’s life was finite.
“Who knows, Henry? He doesn’t.”
“And you can handle the thought that one day he might meet someone else and you will become obsolete?”
How clearly he read my mind. For all my talk of not replacing Ellen, for respecting her memory, my life would pass and another would take my place as surely as I took Ellen’s. I looked away. “I can’t speak for the future; I only know what we have now.” How fervently I clung to the notion because, despite what we had in each other, the future held no certainty.
I had said what I wanted to say, and Henry made it clear, in the way he embraced me as I left the observatory for the warmth of the house, that he did not begrudge our future together. My respect for him was matched only by my admiration for his gentle stoicism and the love he held for his father. For all of that he had not shied from the question which, one day, I would face as inevitably as my death.
CHAPTER
5
Hors de Combat
Although only a few weeks had passed since I’d last been in my apartment, it seemed like decades. Elena must have been in to collect some clothes for me and had tidied the throw and plumped the cushions at the same time, but otherwise left it as she found it. After Matthew’s home I saw it for what it was – empty, soulless, a place merely in which to sleep and pass the time.
Only Mr Fluffy, my pot-bellied cactus, made the place more human.
“I’ll see you this evening,” Matthew promised as he put my bag on my bed. “You know where I am if you need me, just call.” I nodded, missing him already, and he tipped my chin and kissed me as if he understood. “This evening,” he said again and then left me alone.
I toyed with the idea of e-mailing Beth and letting her know our decision to marry in Maine, and then thought of the inevitable response, and justified putting off telling her until the evening on the grounds of self-preservation.
I unpacked slowly, heaving the pile of magazines Pat had given me onto my desk. Wedding magazines – lots of them – thick, glossy, and smug. I leafed through the top one. Brides of all shapes, sizes, and colours and not a freckle in sight. What did the world have against ginger freckles that we were so underrepresented? I noted a glorious redhead on page nineteen but it wasn’t natural, with skin smoothly pale and perfect with not a speckle to mar it. I sighed and concentrated on what they were wearing: extravagant, buoyant concoctions in shiny satins or layers of net. Most were off the shoulder and gathered too high on the waist. Only plainer styles were labelled for the “mature” bride, and at twenty-nine I wasn’t prepared to accept that. With a flurry of regret I remembered going shopping with my mother and sister for a wedding dress for Beth, and knew the same wouldn’t be happening for me. What would Mum say when I told her of our plans? I shuddered at the thought of family weddings, friction, and the inevitable guilt.
I escaped to my tutor room in preparation for the day, burying myself in the comforting familiarity of the seventeenth century, surrounded by posters of flesh-eating monsters and a dead poet.
“So, what do you vagabonds have for me today, then?” I greeted my group cheerfully as they filed into my room.
Josh looked me up and down. “Hey, Dr D, we heard you were dead.” He grinned jovially and I tried not to be taken aback. The events of the last day of the trial seemed so distant now.