Hello. I'm starting on a very different project here. One I'm not fully sure in my own mind where it's going to take me. I wanted to play around with the idea of breaking Mary and Matthew up (without any other party involved in that break up) and see if *and how*they find their way back to each other.
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Matthew sat legs apart, feet flat on the ground in the uncomfortable chair at the long conference table. His hands and fingers alternated between strumming on the table in a rhythmical motion and gripping his left hand in a fist and tapping it softly against his lips.
He did not want to be here.
He did not want this to happen.
But it was not his decision to make.
She wanted it done. Neat and clean.
Across the expanse of the table Mary signed the document in front of her in a quick, decisive motion.
Mary sought to make her own decisions. This was the start.
She stood and shook the hand of her solicitor. She smiled fleetingly.
Her grip was firm. Her eyes directly ahead.
They did not look at each other.
Hers did not stray across the table to meet the ice cool blue eyes of the man she knew would not meet her own.
His eyes, once as clear as an azure sky, now were hooded. Darkened into a mask of indifference.
Their looks had always meant everything. There was no need for words.
Except when everything falls apart.
Now, there was nothing left to say.
Both kept their eyes straight ahead.
The solicitor slid the paperwork across to Matthew.
He gazed stonily at the written words. He swallowed. He already knew what the words said.
He had written plenty of documents just like it. The dispassionate jargon of his profession intended to remove any sensation from the legal transaction being settled. To obfuscate, indeed, to numb, the parties into a confused silence. A deliberate distance placed between the words on the page and the individuals signing. So that the people signing the documents, themselves no longer even a name, but a legal entity, could distance their individual selves from a painful reality.
A legal language masking the fact that the simple action of gripping a pen and moving the thing with ones fingers across a line next to a marked x, would, for the second time in little more than a year, change his life forever.
The document granted Mary an uncontested divorce.
A divorce she wanted and he had agreed to. Giving up on a marriage she now believed … she, and hence they,... had entered into when they were far too young.
Her father had convinced her that after Patrick's death, after the utter failure of her first year away from home at college, that the marital arrangement with the new heir was the best thing for her future.
The divorce was for her an end to being controlled by others. A life bound by duty, stifled by a suffocating love.
Matthew did not want to keep her in such a life. In such a marriage.
He blamed himself for forcing her into it too soon. Robert had wanted it done. Matthew, in love with Mary from the first moment he set eyes on her, agreed.
Six months after he came to live in Downton Village they married. Her parents had wanted it. She had just turned 21. They had created a marriage settlement giving Mary a generous trust fund from her inheritance.
Matthew wanted no such arrangement. His work as a City lawyer would handle his own private expenses. At 24 he was just beginning his career in a prestigious London law group. He would travel back and forth as necessary.
Eight months later it was all over. Another set of legal documents were compiled. An agreement reached through mediation.
He agreed to all of Mary's terms. Mary would still have her trust fund in the divorce. He would still help run the estate alongside Robert.
He would set her free.
It was what she wanted.
His hand gripped the pen. Such an ordinary pen, he thought idly, looking at the markings on the side indicating the law firm's name. He clicked it methodically as he worked his way through the sheets of the documents.
An ordinary pen that he would use to sign a series of pages. Pages that would break the foundation of a life he thought they had had a chance to create together. A false life he now understood. Fissures he should have seen coming. Cracks he did see if he wasn't lying to himself.
The denouement of their marriage came ironically during a night neither would ever forget. Their fragile love, their needy desire, their physical hunger had erupted in an ardent, emotionally brutal coupling, in which both tried to break the other.
The endeavor had left them sexually satiated but emotionally shattered.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Matthew settled into silence. A deadly weapon, silence, when used effectively. And Matthew, a mind trained to use words effectively to manipulate, now knew, to his eternal shame, that he could wield silence as well.
He had shut down. The last few weeks they barely communicated. Never looked at each other.
Mary became scathing in her conversation. Attempting to fight his silence with a devastating, caustic wit.
Silence and sarcasm became their weapons. Their protective masks against the truth.
Displacing the raw, needy passion that left them naked and exhausted on top of the mussed sheets as each had sought to find the center of the other's emotional breaking point.
Mary, frustrated beyond measure with his silence, had finally communicated the one set of words she thought would break his silence.
Their marriage was not working. They should end it and allow each to get on with their lives.
At first he stared at her. He then curtly nodded.
Mary took his nod as approval. As confirmation that he understood they were no good for each other.
That they had given up on their chance at happiness.
Matthew knew it to be true.
He took the pen in his fingers. Gripped it tightly. Looked down at the document one more time. And signed his full name in a legible and meticulous fashion. Not the hurried hacked signature he placed regularly on court papers, illegible as a real name. This was done to give him the full knowledge of what he was doing.
It was done.
Matthew shoved the documents across the table, pulled his chair noisily back from the table, and left the room. The door slammed upon his exit. He could not stay in the room a moment longer. His movement betraying his fragile state. If he was to survive emotionally whole, he had to leave. One look at Mary and he would beg her to change her mind.
So he left.
Mary, once Matthew left the room, sunk into the chair and slowly let out the breath of air she had been holding in.
It was done. She had her life back. She was still young and had the chance to make something of it independent of her family and their stifling, traditional existence. She was done conforming to the fitness of things.
The cost, however, was to accept Matthew's absence from that life.
That night they knew instinctively each held the other's soul. They would be incomplete without the other.
Such a revelation scared Mary to her core being. She had thought herself immune to such romantic notions. She had laughed when previous beaus spoke of eternal love. She was still young enough to believe such things impossible.
So when Matthew, gripping her naked body in his arms, dared speak the words of love in raw and possessive tones, she retreated away from it. Away from what she told herself was a stifling existence, bound to a man who presumed to own her body and soul.
She wanted to talk to him about it; how she was scared by such impassioned language.
Instead, in her inexperience, she made fun of him. She used his words as weapons against him. Against the truth of her own feelings. And he retreated into silence.
And so they found themselves in this office, signing these documents.
She believed she was doing the right thing.
Yet as Matthew slammed the door behind him, she could not be sure that she had not just ruined everything.