by C F Dunn
He shifted uneasily. “Elena’s a big girl; she can see who she likes. I don’t want to come across as the overbearing male type.”
“She’s your fiancée, Matias. You might respect her independence, but he sure as anything won’t respect you. There are times to back off, but this isn’t one of them. Stake your claim – make it clear you won’t stand any nonsense.”
“I thought he was supposed to be dating your niece?”
“Oh, he is, but I don’t expect for one moment that that will stop him. There are some boundaries he doesn’t observe.” A jaundiced nuance had slipped in where I hadn’t meant it to be. Matias looked at me.
“Like that, was it?”
“Yes,” I acknowledged, “it was like that.”
I saw the expression on Guy’s face and the glance he threw at me as Matias confronted him – a considered look, thoughtful, a game interrupted, but not thwarted. Guy gave a dismissive shrug, redolent of his Gallic heritage.
Matias returned with Elena. “That son-of-a…” he controlled himself, “… is making himself too damned comfortable around here if you ask me.”
Elena managed to appear a little abashed, but not enough to mollify him. “We were only talking.”
“No, Elena, that wasn’t what he was doing,” Matias growled. “If he comes near you again, I’ll… I’ll… Damn it – just keep away from him.”
Guy held my gaze with a look I couldn’t fathom. “I don’t think you have to worry about Elena,” I said slowly. “She’s not what he’s interested in.”
“Then what the hell does he want?” Matias fumed, catching Elena’s little pout, which did nothing to appease him.
“I don’t know.” Guy had been leaning on one elbow, stroking his top lip as he watched the effect he had on our tiny group.
Matias hunched his shoulders. “Well, I’m sure as heck not staying around here to find out. We’ll go someplace else to eat.”
I put my plate on the long table in front of me and slid onto the bench, dumping my bag and case next to me. “Thanks, but I think I’ll stay here; I’m not going to be driven away by him. Mmm, this pepper looks rather good and I don’t want to waste food.” I picked up my fork.
Elena pulled a face. “But Em, it is disgusting and cold, and you always waste food.”
I prodded the limp lettuce. “Well, perhaps it’s time I turned over a new leaf. I’ll see you later.” They left and I surveyed the lifeless heart of the pepper, sinking the tines of the fork through the soft, red flesh. Oil seeped from the wounds, gathering on the lettuce in yellow pools. Oh, and a thought, so deliciously tempting that it stung, prickled my being. A shape passed between me and the light.
“That wasn’t very sporting of you, Emma, but then you never played by the rules.” His eyes flickered to my plate and back again. I looked down; I had stabbed the pepper unconsciously and the fork now lay buried deep within the body of the fruit.
“Only because you wrote them, Guy. My friends are off limits.”
“You make me sound so scheming.”
“Well, aren’t you? Don’t feel you have to keep me company.”
He came around to my side of the table and I could feel the heat radiating from him. “Ellie sees you as being basically good-hearted, although she doesn’t understand how you could have treated me so abominably. She’ll forgive you – in time. Your sister-in-law, on the other hand, seems to think otherwise.”
“My sister-in-law?”
He rested a palm lightly on the table. A few strands of brown hair protruded from his cuff. “Yes – Maggie – that was her name. Bit of a cold fish, I thought, and she doesn’t like you, does she? I’m surprised; I thought you would have a lot in common. Still, I expect she has her reasons.” His hand left the table and rested deliberately on the bare skin of my shoulder. “How is your husband, by the way?”
“Take your hand off me!” I fought the urge to turn my head and bite him, and instead shrugged violently to rid me of it. His fingers dug deeper and he bent close, his mouth grazing my ear.
“There was a time when my hand wasn’t what you wanted.”
I tried to prise him off. “I was a fool.”
“It seems to run in the family. Does your husband know what you like? Should I tell him, or leave it to his imagination?” He squeezed the top of my shoulder, flesh on flesh, almost painful now. “Ellie’s a lively girl; she reminds me of you. She’s Matthew’s niece, isn’t she? She seems very fond of him…”
“What do you want from me, Guy?”
“I never used to have to spell it out.” His fingers stretched over the curve of my shoulder and under the strap of my top. I grasped the fork, fashioning it into a weapon, but I looked up as somebody else joined us.
“Emma? You OK?”
“Sam!” Never had I been so glad to see him. His dark eyes took in Guy’s hand and then my face.
“It seems I’m not the only one you made a fool of,” Guy said in an audible undertone, straightening and leaving a hot, tacky patch where his hand had been. Sam’s face turned sour. “I’m going to meet Ellie at the medical centre. Looking forward to the conference tomorrow. No doubt I’ll see you around.” He turned, his hand bumping against the case balanced next to me on the bench. He caught it without thinking as it slid precariously close to the edge. As he steadied it, his nostrils flared and he took one last, unreadable look at me before walking rapidly away, leaving me wondering what it was he had seen. Then I remembered Sam. He had recovered from the slight, and a little of the old gleam returned.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure. I sort of know the signs. You didn’t look as if you wanted him around.” He allowed a hint of a smile to slip through the irony. “I haven’t seen you lately, Em – heard you’re married. I never got to say congratulations. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” I said again.
“I guess you’ll be staying in Maine now?”
“Reckon so,” I drawled, not feeling particularly humorous.
“Dirty Harry?”
I shook my head. “Josie Wales. How are you, Sam?”
He grunted, nodding slowly. “Sure, yeah, OK – all things considered. You?”
I contemplated the door through which Guy had disappeared moments before. “I’m OK, thanks.” I clutched the shabby leather handle of the case. “All things considered.”
The tepid shower helped. I scrubbed my skin raw where Guy’s hand had lain, smothering the lingering sensation in body lotion until I couldn’t recall the feeling any more. Then, as Matthew still wasn’t home yet, I went to sit in the light shade of the little orchard, taking Grandpa’s heavy case and a bottle of water. The new trees were watered regularly, and here the grass – still long and lush under the protection of their branches – felt cool against my skin. In contrast, the hide of the case burned to touch. Something about this case caught Guy’s eye. Nothing on the outside looked remarkable in the slightest and, except for Grandpa’s initials in dulled chrome beneath the handle, it seemed nondescript.
The catches slid t-chlik stiffly aside under the persistent pressure of my thumbs. The distantly familiar scent of tobacco-impregnated paper and old-fashioned ink emanated from the worn pages, mingling with memories as sharp as yesterday. I ran my hand over the uppermost book, lifting it to my face, and inhaled.
Diaries.
Diaries covering the period from his early days at Cambridge through to the 1990s, with a gap in between for the war. Academic diaries in cloth-bound, foolscap books – later A4 – and each the thickness of thick-sliced bread. Day diaries recording the mundane. His journals. He often urged me to keep one, but they had seemed like a lifetime beholden to pointless pedantry when I saw so much more in history to explore. But then I had been young and eager to make my mark. I remembered him writing in one – this one. I lifted the red book with the sticky price still attached and a smear of ink across the cover. These were different to the little notebooks he used in his research into the journal, like the
one that had led me to Matthew in what seemed a lifetime ago.
I leafed through the books, each with a gummed label declaring the first and last dates the diary covered, going back in time until I found the first. I opened the cover: a slip of paper stuck on a page, the glue yellowing the edges. The date, the time, the venue:
And the contact details of the auctioneer.
So, this is where it all started for my grandfather. Next to the flyer, he had written: “Visited auction at curious mansion somewhat west of Portland. Sale of effects, etc. Fine library. Bidding strong. Bought box of papers, etc.” And that was it.
I shooed a small fly from my leg where it had settled in a spot of sun, more surprised than anything at the paucity of information. No fanfare of trumpets or triumphant declaration of an antiquity discovered, just “Bought box of papers, etc.”
He had yet to sort through the box, to catalogue the contents in his meticulous hand. He did so some months after his return to his teaching position at Cambridge, and it seemed as if it injected life with a vibrancy that had been lacking, because – all at once – in page after page, he recorded hours spent transcribing the tatty wedge of papers he found at the bottom of the box tied with a faded red ribbon. Not the details themselves – that he did in a separate book – but his thoughts and impressions, his theories and conjecture, all of which infected me in the late days of his life, when I was just starting mine. Wind lifted a strand of my hair like fingers of copper across my face, calling my name in the purl of leaves, Emmaa, and in the heat, I shivered.
I traced my life through his in the history of those pages. Through his eyes I discovered the original journal, felt his keen disappointment when age and ill-health prevented his travel to seek out the rest of it for himself, but could not extinguish the ardour with which it consumed him. I began to read in him what my parents had feared to see in me – an obsession burning so hot that all else faded in comparison. Too hot, too bright.
Grandpa lived through Nathaniel Richardson’s eyes, traced him back to the land from which he came. I read of his astonishment to discover how close to Cambridge he had lived, how over time he tracked him down to an obscure and lost manor in a peaceful corner of Rutland. Was it no coincidence, then, that he found himself recovering from his war injuries at the neighbouring manor where he met Nanna? Or by design?
I never thought of my grandfather as being calculating; he was always Grandpa. Yet, it became clear in page after page that he followed a route as precisely as if he had planned it.
“I wondered if I might find you out here.” I smiled vaguely as Matthew dropped down in the long grass beside me, gifting a kiss on my upturned face. I had lost track of time. He raised the edge of the book with a finger and read the label. “Where have you been this afternoon?”
“Here.”
“No, I mean where have you been transported to?”
“Oh – here.” I held up the diary for him to see.
“Isn’t this what your grandmother left you?” He picked up the next book in the series, flicked through the pages, and then, as he noted the content, lapsed into silence as we each became engrossed in the minutiae of academia half a century or more before.
Eventually, my eyes aching from straining to read Grandpa’s tight script, I closed the diary, contemplating how easy I found it, surrounded by all the normality of life, to forget that the man I had married was the same whose name haunted these pages. Frowning now and again as he read the entries, Matthew appeared wholly absorbed, caressing my hair absentmindedly.
I watched the shadow-play of leaves against his face, the way his lips parted a little, then tightened again as he read. The heat of the day had yielded a comfortable warmth, and I settled further into the grass using his outstretched legs as a pillow. “Sorry about lunch earlier; did your patient make it?”
“He did.” He turned a page, read on, then skipped a few. He seemed particularly intent on a section from the early 1970s. He didn’t look up. “Did Matias find you?”
The sun cast a deep cleft at the hollow of his throat that I found mesmerizing. “He did.” I twisted to get a closer look, the light fabric of my shirt riding up and exposing my skin to the touch of the warm air.
“If you keep staring at me like that, I’m going to have to do something about it,” he declared, snapping the book shut. He ran his hands over my bared stomach, moulding them to my curves, and kissed the rise of my tummy. “So, you’ve had lunch?”
An image of thin, red flesh giving way to sharp steel supplanted the sensation of Guy’s hand on my naked shoulder. I sat up, knocking the diaries to one side in my haste.
Matthew drew back in surprise. “What’s the matter?”
Pulling my shirt down, I rolled onto my knees and started stacking the diaries. “Nothing. It’s too exposed here.” The placid, undulating grassland, devoid of all sign of humanity, sang with tiny birds darting from stalk to swaying stalk.
He watched my hassled movements for a moment. “OK, so I’m assuming this has nothing to do with sparing the blushes of the avian population?”
I stopped. “Did you know Guy’s met Maggie?”
“Yes, Ellie told me she had taken him to meet her. What of it?”
“You don’t think she might let something slip accidentally, or on purpose, do you? Only, Guy has a way of extracting information without someone noticing he’s doing it.”
“And you think that Maggie’s too unstable or too vengeful to be trusted?” He secured the lid and then helped me to my feet. We walked slowly up the rise towards the house, our way heralded by the startled whirr of rising birds. “I think Maggie’s recovered enough not to let slip anything accidentally, and I don’t think she’ll purposefully harm us – or you – for one simple reason.” He swapped the case to his other hand, and took mine in his. “She thinks you won’t be around long and it’s just a matter of time before you leave. She won’t say anything to Guy because she knows I will never forgive her if she does. She’s willing to bide her time.” He came to a standstill. “She’s still delusional, Emma – stable, but delusional. Let her wait – she’ll have to wait a very long time – and perhaps, by then, she’ll have forgotten why she dislikes you so much.”
We reached the courtyard and I was still thinking about my reluctance to ask for help and pondering whether it represented stubborn pride or a lack of trust, when Matthew placed Grandpa’s case on the kitchen table.
“Emma, if I’ve interpreted his diaries correctly, I’m surprised by the amount of forward planning your grandfather seems to have made. It wasn’t the impression I gained from your description of him. He wasn’t just scrupulous in his record-keeping, was he? He left nothing to chance.”
“Yes,” I agreed slowly, glad to shake ourselves free of the previous topic of Maggie like a dog shedding fleas. “I hadn’t considered it until today. I always thought him a bit of a plodder, a duffer, in the nicest possible way, of course.”
He smiled. “Of course.”
“But he wasn’t at all from what I can see. He seemed to have had an agenda, although he doesn’t state it as such. It runs through everything he did, like a subplot almost.” So Grandpa proved to be more systematic than I remembered, and that would have been fine, but for one thing: reading his diaries reminded me of reading notes from a more recent past; it was like reading Guy.
CHAPTER
28
Between the Lines
It bugged me.
I tussled fitfully between broken sleep – words, phrases, half-remembered, warped by time, running like a seam of quartz through the dull obscurity of the everyday.
“She always harboured grudges – it runs in her family.”
Runs in her family. Family.
The reference to my family had struck me as odd at the time, dropped in as a seemingly careless remark, which meant it couldn’t be; but I had given it no other thought beyond the hurt Guy intended. I had assumed he referred to my parents – to my father – whose fist
ensured Guy had taken a week off work with “flu”. At the time I wondered how he explained his bloodied nose to his wife, and what lies he told to appease her curiosity. Yet, despite his sudden rage, Dad pursued the matter no further, so it wasn’t a reference to my father, I felt sure of that.
Faint sounds of running water from the direction of the bathroom beckoned dawn. Matthew was halfway through shaving and I folded my arms around his stomach and laid my face against his back. His muscles undulated beneath my cheek. “Did I wake you?”
“No, I couldn’t sleep.” Resting my chin on his shoulder, I watched the razor make a clean path through the snowy foam until the foundations of his face were revealed. He washed his face, and rubbed it dry. In the silvered reflection of the mirror, he met my eyes. “Are you worried about the conference?”
“Not the conference, no, although I should be. I bet my students didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“About Guy, then?”
“Guy? Yes – always.”
I wasn’t prepared for the sheer number of delegates, already stewing in their suits in the morning heat, crowding the glass-roofed concourse outside the main lecture theatre. Neither, by the look of it, was Eckhart. I saw his balding head with its fringe of tonsured hair bobbing up and down like a cork among the tide of faces. His eyes went round behind his thick-rimmed specs as he spotted me, and his arm went up like a drowning man. “Ah, Pro… Professor!” He pushed through the bodies, clipboard clenched beneath his arm. “Professor – you’re here!” I was only a few minutes later than planned and still in plenty of time – a miracle given the amount of traffic this morning. Clutching the clipboard like a lifebuoy, he launched before I could return his greeting. “Almost everyone is here. The delegates have signed in but Professor Maas is recovering from s… sickness and he won’t be here until later this afternoon.” His hands shook. “As agreed, you will open the conference and your keynote lecture has been rescheduled for after lunch as you requested… and then if you would introduce the second speaker, Professor…” he checked the board, “Professor Geo… Geog…” Poor man; Eckhart looked as if he would combust as he struggled with the unfamiliar Irish name.