He, ever the gentleman, opens the door for her and in her criminally high heels, Mary almost trips over the threshold. She's too busy laughing and fumbling her way out of her jacket to care, though, and his smile is benevolent.
"Too much to drink," he says fondly as she stumbles over to the chaise by the window, falls down, quite gracefully, onto it. She's swamped by darkness; dark hair that haunts her pale face and falls across her shoulders like velvet, dark eyes that speak languages formed by no tongue and known by no peoples, a dark dress that tumbles down her figure and clings in the appropriate places. With that and the dark house (the back of his mind is somewhat irritated that the electrician hasn't been able to fix the circuit board yet), all he can see of her is the whiteness: the side of her face not silhouetted, a sliver of teeth betrayed by her laugh, the pearls in her ears and his rock on her finger.
"Don't spoil my fun," she replies and her raspy voice, always a tell-tale sign of inebriation, is almost as seductive as her cloying perfume, the one that consumed his senses and left him quite delirious at times.
She crosses her ankles, grins quickly at him, bends down and strips a Gianvito Rossi shoe from her foot. So it's that kind of a night, he thinks.
In his haste, his fingers fumble over the light switches. There's a flicker of warm light before the darkness overwhelms again. Every light downstairs comes on at once and the minimalistic living room is bathed in kind yellow light. It takes him a few moments but he realises that the scream, so high and such an alien sound in a place such as this, is coming from his wife.
He hates the sound; rushes over to her, pulls her up, grabs her by the shoulders and his hands dig into her clavicles. "What is it," he demands and his light eyes dart between the front door, the curling staircase that leads upstairs, the alarm system.
Mary stops screaming (thank God) but her red painted mouth hangs open, her pupils so dilated that there's little of the brown irises left visible. A finger, a shaking manicured finger, points at the French windows that look out onto the Square.
"There. Don't you see him," she whispers, "just by the tree." His eyes follow her finger but it's shaking too much to be of much use. Instead, he traces her line of vision, sees the tree but nothing more.
"No," he replies and it comes out sharper than he intended. Mary's gaze breaks and she giggles nervously.
"But I see him." Her voice is no more than a breath now. Slowly, he kisses her jawline, from ear to chin, and she relaxes back into him, lowers her finger, sighs.
"You're tired," he coaxes and she leans heavily against him as they stumble up stairs and into the bedroom. Outside, there's a mournful rustle of leaves as his weight shifts from left to right and then there is no one gazing in at her.
He wakes against soft Egyptian cotton, his yellow hair glinting in the morning light, and smiles at the wife he expects to be by his side. His lips form a moue of disappointment at her absence and he rises slowly from the bed.
"Mary," he calls and his voice echoes across the marble floors, carries over the framed photographs of their wedding day and the tall vases of peroxide white lillies.
A perfectly groomed eyebrow quirks at the sound of his voice. His footsteps pound, none too delicately, down the stairs and her pulse quickens. Her fingers stroke the keys deftly; his footsteps are louder and a window pops up to tell her the search history has been deleted. He comes into view just as she pulls up a generic page on the FT's website.
"Morning, darling." She smiles brightly, rises to kiss him and turns from the glint of suspicion in his eyes.
"Chinese," she asks, holding two menus aloft and cocooned in cashmere, "or Indian?"
He smiles at her from the wine rack, an object vast in both size and expense, and filled with bottles whose labels declare them explicitly to be from France and Italy; implicitly, to cost an amount that beggars belief.
"Your choice," he replies and she sets the sound system to play Radiohead while she makes the phone call.
He answers the door when the knocker sounds half an hour later, pays for it with a bullet to the heart and blood that soaks his shirt, stains the marble when he crumples to the ground like a puppet whose strings have been slashed, dulls the yellow gold of his wedding ring.
Her tip is the ear-splitting shriek that erupts when she hears the gunshot, slips in her knitted slippers on the way to the door, sees the blond man standing on the threshold with a gun in one hand and those butane flame blue eyes of his promise nothing but devotion and humility.
"Matthew," she gasps as her husband's blood inches slowly towards her, seeps into the knitted wool and laps against her toes.
"You'll always be my Mary," the little boy in front of her says, ever so rationally and ever so intensely. He grows up quickly, becomes Matthew Reginald Crawley, City hotshot and maverick lawyer, in the instant it takes for him to press the barrel of the gun to his temple and blow his brains out. He slips from his prim stance and wilts quite beautifully so that he lies sleeping next to Richard, their life substance intermingling on the stone.
Two blond men, four blue eyes gaze up at Mary and she can't be sure if she's giggling because the Chinese never came or because the Veronan tragedy has never been interpreted in quite this way. She sees blue flashing lights (like his eyes, only lacking in his urgency) through the trees of Eaton Square.
The irony is, she's standing all alone because all the boys think she should be otherwise occupied. It's only that the planes of her face discourage them from making the first move; a woman like that, goes the unspoken yet general consensus, defies the usual principles.
Matthew knows, though, that her haughty disposition is only a facade, that underneath she makes him laugh like no one else, can kill a man with a verbal dagger or raise him from the clutches of the darkness with a few carefully chosen and softly spoken words. There's a vulnerability in her eyes, a fear of finding out that wax is a poor adhesive and that the Sun is awfully high above the ground, that comes across as arrogance to the uninitiated. So he takes the plunge, makes the first move and every male fresher in the room simultaneously, silently wishes him luck and hopes he'll be cut to shreds.
"Mary," he grins and in contrast to her velveteen sophistication, he's all floppy hair and rounded face; a blue shirt and khakis where she's Sandro jeans and Isabel Marant boots.
"Matthew," she smiles and God knows she tries to keep the weariness out of her voice. She's no fool; she knows everyone else in the JCR is watching them and there's a man in the corner (a man, as opposed to Matthew's boy) with dark hair and dark eyes she'd much rather be talking too.
"Strange, that we ended up at the same college. I thought you were applying to Clare?" Oh, he's perfectly amiable and he witters on about the pros and cons of Clare versus Emmanuel, and she's sure there's another undergrad somewhere (probably reading English Lit, too, or French or something equally unemployable in this economic climate) who'd be more forthcoming, but she's bored of him.
"Do you mind, Matthew? The point of Freshers is to get to know other people and we know each other fairly well, I'd say. Being cousins and all." She interrupts his lecture, sees his eyes widen in anxiety and almost takes pity on him. Her tone was probably too blunt, her smile too forced but that guy in the corner is making eyes at her and he won't stay there forever.
Matthew swallows noisily. "We're not really cousins, though. Not closely related or anything. Nothing that'd stop-"
She can't believe she's hearing this. "Stop what? Look, I'm flattered and all, Matthew, but you're just not my type. So please, stop pestering me." She makes to move off but his hand catches her wrist and in the back of her mind, his strength surprises her.
"You'll always be my Mary," he says and his innocent eyes only frighten her further, "because my Mary is the true Mary."
She swallows back her cry of fear; the next day, she plays the title card, argues with tutors for hours and transfers to Clare College. And that, she thinks, is the end of that.
A/N:
title from charles bukowski
inspired by/accompanying song is 'if it hadn't been for love' - the steeldrivers
'four cold walls against my will
at least i know she's lying still
four cold walls without parole
lord have mercy on my soul'
(JCR stands for Junior Common Room, a common room for undergrads; Freshers is Freshers Week, where all the new undergrads spend a week partying/getting used to uni life at the start of the new year; and Clare and Emmanuel Colleges are both found at Cambridge University)