wo weilest du?
V
February, 1939
“It's cooler than I thought,” Mary murmured, as they waited for William outside the house; her mother and Edith huddled inside, in the library, in front of the fire, but she would rather be out here with the cold burning at her lungs than in that stifling room.
“Here,” Matthew whispered, and she felt his hands come round her shoulders, jacket enveloping her. She touched his forearm in thanks, shirtsleeve cool and crisp under her fingers, then absently moved her hand to the centre of his back, palm stilling there as they both looked to a fixed point down the drive, where a silhouette wavered in the outlying fog.
“Typically like you, independent of transport,” Mary said. She felt Matthew's hesitant laugh, his eyes intent on William's wavering figure; even from afar he looked gaunt, this thin and lithe creature with his flop of dark hair and his bag throwing his shoulders off-kilter. He stopped a few paces short of them, and placed his bag down on the gravel. Mary's hand stayed sure on Matthew's back, his body leaning to press against it, a silent indication for her to go forward.
“Hello!” Charlotte chirped beside them, held steady under her father's hand.
“Hello, Chalkie,” William said kindly.
He let out a breath and looked at his parents, hands splaying uncomfortably at his sides. “Well,” he said. “Earl and Countess, then.” His voice shook, eyes an ungodly blue, nervous.
She hated that he'd had to come home now. She hugged him fiercely, and he smelled different, she thought, the air of dawn caught in his coat alongside train fumes. He took a breath and turned to Matthew, whose shoulders sank in appraisal of him, a quiet study with just his eyes; reaching out to smooth a hand to the boy's hair, that gentle, jarring look returning to his face. “Little Lord William,” he said, voice smaller and rougher than she'd ever heard it.
William smiled, tilting his chin up proudly. “Papa.” He sniffed, looking about cursorily before softly laughing. “Awfully gallant of you to give Mama your jacket, but you must be bloody freezing out here.”
Matthew pulled William sidelong against him, giving Mary a knowing look over his head. “I'm making up for my proposal. It was snowing that night, I'll have you know,” he said playfully.
Mary gave a weak smile at his raised eyebrow, her hands tilting further into the wool. “I wasn't cold, then.” Her eyes glowed.
“No, I suppose you weren't,” Matthew murmured. William noticed the gaze between them and tactfully extricated himself from his father's grip.
“Right,” he said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “I really should say hello to Grandmama. Come on then, you.”
Charlotte took his hand happily. Just like that, the moment slipped, and the cold hit Mary again, watching them retreat to the door and slide from focus as she looked back into Matthew's imploring gaze, his own feet pivoting toward the house. Mary took a deep breath and followed, her hand finding Matthew's back again as they crossed the threshold; his hand reaching behind as they walked through the great hall toward the library and the sound of Cora tearfully greeting her grandson. His fingers squeezed hers, thumb brushing the inside line of her fingers and letting go as her hand slipped to his side, low on his hip, then away, and he watched her enter the room ahead of him with his jacket still on, taking in the strange, vulnerable and boxy shape of it on her frame.
He wondered what out of Robert's things they would keep. What of his father did he have? The inventory was small: photographs (those eyes were a strong trait, it seemed), letters, books. A pocket watch.
__
November, 1939
He was gone.
Just like Matthew had been gone all those years ago, vanished, missing, without explanation. She'd imagined him terribly wounded, torn limb from limb; she'd imagined blood and blue eyes, bluer than the hazy sky they looked to. She'd imagined him returning unrecognisable, speaking German, but still with her toy dog in his hand; she'd imagined him seeing her and not knowing who she was.
In the two months since war's outbreak, their son had donned a uniform and left for the drone of planes. Matthew, too, often disappeared.
“Do you remember we used to call him Willow?”
“After 'Wind in the Willows'.”
“He only ever let you read it to him.”
“Because I did all the voices. He told me once that he thought Carson was quite like Badger.”
She tracked Matthew's movements from the edge of the stairs, his uneasy pacing back and forth along the carpet. “We shouldn't have let him go,” she whispered. “It all makes me feel so tired, Matthew. And so very desperately sad.”
He stopped moving.“Understand, Mary, that he had to go,” he said. “I hate it too, but he had to.” She stared at him in his uniform, bleached by the low autumn light, and with the brace and the aiguillettes and the straightness with which he held his back, she could imagine they were back in 1917. He still looked fine in it, regal even; she felt a small bought of shame at such attraction being stirred below her concern, her anger; yet the conflicting emotions were a re-visitation from twenty-five years past, no different from in that earlier state of war other than the guilt was gone - she was free to admire him, to worry for him, to engage him.
“What will happen if...?”
He shut his eyes. “Is that what you think I care about, in all this?” he said, voice thick. “Whether he'll carry the line?”
“What if he dies?” she said. “What will you do about an heir then?
He gave her a dangerous look, voice crackling with emotion. “Don't play with me, Mary. We don't know what losing a child is like, thank God.”
Not yet hung in the air, and her eyes were sharp, and he could tell she didn't think at all before she said what she did next. “But many people do know what that's like, now!”
Matthew was winded, felt suddenly sick with her words, seeing all those young men again; boys, from a country with a language not his own, that he had - “If we lose him - if - then we will mourn him like any other family does, and in that time I will have no thought for the bloody estate or the god-damn title.”
“Oh, don't you see, Matthew?” she said, throwing up her arms. “Families like ours must worry for it. Before anything else. Why do you think my father was the way he was?”
His gaze steeled; he let out an incredulous breath, and left her alone in several quick strides of the room.
_
She found him in the library, staring out at the grounds, mouth a grim line. He didn't notice her come in. The wireless was on, faintly murmuring under a higher static, the volume hastily turned down. Mary came up behind him and touched his shoulder, standing at his periphery on tentative feet. “Darling, I'm sorry,” she whispered.
His shoulder jumped under her palm. His eyes were a cold silver and she stepped backward until her back hit the bookshelves on the opposite side of the room. She shut her eyes, hands over her face, and breathed into her palms until she heard him move. She pushed herself toward where he was perched on the sofa. “I should be sorry,” he whispered, eyes closing slowly in anguish. She sat next to him and it came as a relief that he let her pull his head into the recess of her shoulder; his breath stuttered, and she pushed his hair from his forehead, curling the dark blond of it, cool and sleek, in her fingers.
“I'm terrified, you know. For him. I know what it could mean for him and... I don't want him to be ruined.”
“You're not, Matthew.”
His voice was bitter and distant. “Maybe. By luck.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He edged closer to her, until his nose was pressing into her neck; she bent over him and kissed the edge of his jaw, the jump of his pulse, his eyelashes flickering on her skin. “I thought I'd only have to wear this bloody uniform once a year,” he said, cruelly. “And now I don't know when I'll be out of it. I... didn't know whether to be proud or despondent, seeing Will in his.”
“Proud at first, despondent later.”
A breath of laughter hit her neck.
“Anyhow,” she admonished. “You're here. And all of us are on the right side of the line.”
He nodded against her and said nothing more, staying still with his hands held loosely in his lap. She watched the tremor in his fingers slow, the sharp outline of the tendons recede from his skin. After some time, he shifted up from her grasp, with gracious eyes, and pressed a tiny kiss behind her ear.
The right side of the line.
__
ii
July, 1942
Dinner was a non-event. With only them in the house it seemed rather pointless; yet somehow, out of rigorous tradition, they had dressed for it.
He watched Mary walk out onto the terrace, shadowed by the evening. She moved toward the darkened grounds, dress glimmering in the soft oblong light from the windows. She seemed slimmer, sleeker, body folded upon itself and pale, apart from her dark head. There was a record on the gramophone, the sound floating delicately out from the great hall.
She heard his footsteps slow on the gravel as he stood behind her, his palm suddenly warm between her shoulder blades. She looked up and smiled. “It's a nice song,” she murmured.
“It's from some film or another. William left it on his last leave.”
She leaned her head back, hair soft under his jaw. “Did he seem all right, to you?”
“I think he seemed like his mother's storm-braving qualities had taught him well.”
She straightened, turned and looked up into the softness that lined his pale eyes, the reassurance there, but still flecked with edges of doubt. He gave the tinge of a smile, sighed shyly and held his arms out to her. She stepped into them, so familiar with this feeling now, and he led them in a quiet, swaying, non-prescribed dance around the drive.
I'm old fashioned...
“Charlotte will miss him terribly,” she said.
But I don't mind it...
“He'll write to her,” Matthew murmured, and Mary stopped moving. “And he'll write to you, and me, and his Grandmamas. But he won't say everything.”
That's how I want to be...
The night was hot and thick, without a breeze. Matthew looked up at the silent sky, half-expecting the dark smudge of planes to appear, their low drone trailing them, but he only saw Orion's belt. Mary's hand tightened on his shoulder, and he thought of how a shift of cloth could leave one collarbone more exposed than the other; he thought of imperfect symmetry, of the church arches he'd seen still standing in triptychs while the rest had fallen into rubble. He thought of bricks and mortar cracking with frost. Rain. August. Gramophones and hyacinths; he thought of these fragments of a life lived.
... As long as you agree to stay old-fashioned with me.
“It's his birthday tomorrow,” she murmured. “21.”
His hand lingered in hers long after they'd stopped moving; they stayed stood in the middle of the drive just out of reach of the pools of indoor light, the red edge of her dress caught in it, sparked like an ember, his eyes catching silver refractory glints.
“You know, there's something I never gave back to you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I'm afraid it may have more than a few scratches.” He looked down at her from under his eyelashes, and for a moment she felt all her breath leave her. He tucked his cheek next to hers, and whispered, “I've carried her with me always.”
Holding the little toy dog in her palm, she felt the momentous weight of memory spreading an ache through her throat. “Oh, Matthew,” she said. “Thank you.” One of its felted ears was slightly ragged, the eyes no longer gleaming, a streak of dirt worked into the cloth of its left flank. She ran her thumb over the stain, the small green collar. It felt like a neat bit of closure, where she had given it to him in the middle of one war, and here he returned it in the midst of another. She took a thick breath at the remembered image of him; Matthew leaned down and kissed her, tasting salt.
“Now,” he said, looking over her head back to the house. He held her shoulders, slipping past her toward the library doors. “What do you say to a nightcap?”
Mary sniffed, tilting her head at him. “Mmm, someone was once very disapproving of my stealing the Earl's brandy.”
He smiled with the undue assurance of a man confident in the immediate lay of things; boyish and charming, teeth grazing his bottom lip. He smiled proudly, with quiet poise and flirtation. He was leaning against the edge of the open french window, parallel with where it faced the drive; he turned in profile, hands in his pockets, tilting back on his heels. Mary took in the long line of him, gold catching in his hair when he eventually looked back at her.
“Ah,” he said quietly. She let her fingers skim sideways over the buttons of his waistcoat as she passed him, and he sighed, eyelashes flickering. “And... what if we agree.... no names, no pack drill?” he asked.
Meeting his amused gaze, she crossed her index finger over her lips.
end.
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
- T.S. ELIOT; THE WASTE LAND (1922)