A/N: So we begin Part IV. Some time has passed. And if this chapter seems a bit all over the place that is on purpose too. When it comes to Matthew puzzling out his drinking, there is no straightforward way about it. Thanks to La La Kate for great writing talks and support through this chapter and life in general.
Chapter Twenty
This is Matthew's life now.
He wakes in the middle of the bed, on his back, all spread out, feet flung from beneath the covers, as if he is an overgrown child or as if he is trying to fill the whole space of the bed by himself. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. He wipes the sleep out of his eyes. He feels everything–the sheets on his back, where his pajama top rode up during the night; dryness on the pads of his fingertips; cold air on his toes. Even these little things hurt, as if someone is blowing a dog whistle constantly and Matthew is the only one who can hear it. It pierces his ears yet his hands are bound by a thick and nasty rope; he cannot reach up and press his palms to the side of his head. There is a constant ache in the back of his neck. This is shame.
When he thinks of Lavinia, his stomach heaves as if he could vomit. When he thinks of Mary, his eyes water as if he is chopping a whole, raw onion. When he thinks of his mother, he closes his eyes so tightly, he loses his balance. When he thinks of Robert, he picks at his fingernails until they bleed, just because he can. This is guilt.
He would not like to think of the people he failed (and this is, of course, is the shortlist; it does not even include the Dowager Countess and the number of times he split wine on to her frocks) but he cannot help but think of them. There is no numbness now, the one thing he sought for months and months and months. He feels everything so even the air upon his skin hurts, as if he is made up on millions of paper cuts.
This is Matthew's life now.
He sits up. He puts his feet on the floor. He stays like that for a few moments, head hung low between his shoulders, before he rises. The worst part is always soon after. He must look at his own face with his own eyes in the mirror. He hates the mirror.
The first time he looked, really looked–the day he found his stalwart mother crying in her room–he did not recognize himself, the sallow skin, yellowed, the reddened eyes, his jowls swollen. Who are you, he wondered at himself, until he grew so dizzy he vomited into his own hands, held out, a benefaction to his shadow self.
He didn't knock on his mother's door that day because the only ever time he heard his mother cry was the day the relatives all left, after his father died. He touched her shoulder. "Mother," he said gently. Before dinner, his breath already reeked of what he drank. "I am so very sorry about all this. Lavinia...leaving. The divorce. But you must see I never wanted–"
"Oh!" she pushed his hand off of her shoulder and stood up to look at him with eyes brimming with angry tears. "You think I give a fig about the scandal of a divorce when I have this to watch?"
"What are you watching?" he asked, so confused by the intensity of her reaction. "I don't–"
"You!" she sobbed. He never saw her like that in all his life, wretched, beyond distraught. He thought she might pull her hair from her own head. "I'm watching you kill yourself! Every single day. Can you possibly know what it is like to watch the person you love most in the whole world kill himself slowly, no matter how many lectures, no matter his wife leaving him when that–" She struggled for words. "...Do you even know what it means that she left you? It means that she will be a social pariah for the rest of her life. It means people think of her as an adulterer. All of those things were preferable to her than being your wife." She let out another sob, weeping, weeping, weeping. He did not know his mother's face could look like that. Even when she cried after his father died, they were slow tears, burning trails down her cheeks, completely quiet, under her sole ownership. But he owned a stake in these tears, on this night. "But even that. I don't...I can't care because you are my child. And you are killing yourself. And there is nothing Lavinia or Robert or I can do."
"I'm sorry," he whispered and did not realize he cried too.
"You stop that immediately, acting as if it isn't in your control! I've known people addicted to drink. It's that, an addiction, and I know you, Matthew Crawley, and that's not what your drinking is. And don't look at me like that! No, not even your precious Mary could fix this." She covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking. "You lie and tell yourself that if only you and Mary could be together then you wouldn't be in pain. But that's not true, Matthew! Damn you. She made the only choice she could, the only choice you gave her. And what about her, Matthew? If you can't think of me, then think of her? What will Mary feel when you drink yourself to death?"
"Nothing," he replied morosely. "Nothing."
His mother grabbed onto his jacket and tried to shake him. "Matthew! You know that isn't true. I can't talk sense into you. Because no matter what I say, the lies the drink tell you are stronger." She let go, wiping her eyes. Her voice was as abrupt as a knife to his skin. "Now leave my room."
He drank his last drink that night.
Not because of the divorce. Not even for Mary. Or his mother. But because for a moment, in her rage and tears, he saw himself in her eyes–the first true reflection of himself–and he saw that his mother was right: the man he saw was killing himself. Slowly. Torturously. By degrees. Out of sadness or boredom or because he simply could.
Matthew doesn't want to die. In the trenches, that single thought kept him awake at night. He held dying men in his arms and he told them, "You are going to be fine." He lied. He lied for them as often as he could. "Tell my mother I loved her, tell her I didn't cry," one boy said, his cheeks bloodied but smooth, without even hair to shave. He did not even need a razor yet. So Matthew lied: "You can tell her yourself when you see her. You're going to make it, man." But he wasn't a man; he was a boy, too smart and too young to die, his last words: "You are a bad liar, Crawley."
You are a bad liar, Crawley.
He own memories are merciless, his brain searching for a pattern somewhere.
"I mean it, Matthew," Lavinia said, after she caught the show that flopped dancing, kissing. "Don't ever let me be a nuisance."
And after too, while she was still recovering: she asked him, "Do you love me? Do you want to marry me? Still?"
"It may sound strange," he replied then, not even truly aware of the words he spoke, "And thank God, you are better. But this episode has convinced me..." He drew in a breath. "...that I must marry you more than ever. I could never lose you. I cannot imagine losing you and going on without you...a hole would open up inside of me...I don't know what kind of man I would be if I lost you."
Somewhere else in the midst of her recovery, her hand fluttered to his. "Edith came by. She said," Lavinia swallowed. "She said many of the men, after the war, have nightmares. Do you? Do you have nightmares?"
"No, darling." He smiled at her.
You are a bad liar, Crawley.
Matthew's nightmares began long before he left for the front. "Would you have stayed? If I accepted you?" Mary's voice, over and over, tears catching in her throat, as lovely as the strand of pearls around it.
That's when the doubts started, the nightmares of what if. What if he asked her why she cried? If she didn't care? What if he asked her why she seemed so certain she wanted to marry him and yet unable to give him the word he wanted most of all: yes?
If he is honest with himself, yes, if he is truly honest, it might have started then. Actually, enjoying drinks at dinner instead of just for show, asking for nightcap just because he needed Mary erased from his memory desperately. And then there was the war, nerves frayed, holding young boys who didn't know how to hold a razor: "You're a bad liar, Crawley."
On his honeymoon with Lavinia, they drank bottles of wine because they were in Italy and married and happy and alive. God, yes, they were alive after she almost died and he almost never walked again. So he poured more into her glass as she giggled and told her they were celebrating. It wasn't a lie because they were. Only he needed the wine for the ache in his back and he needed the wine so he didn't wake in the middle of the night scaring his new wife with his tears and his ghosts.
So it's all a blur, you see.
He can still remember sitting and receiving Robert's letter, announcing to his mother, "He wants to change our lives." How young he was, impossibly so. He did not yet know how completely off course one could go.
I wouldn't want to push in.
So he learned that it is not only a letter that change the course of one's life, but a beautiful face with a raised eyebrow and too much gumption.
You are a bad liar, Crawley.
It isn't Robert's fault anymore than it is Patrick's fault for buying a ticket for the Titanic. It isn't even Mary's fault.
He stops drinking the night he finds his mother crying. But he doesn't stop looking for a cause or a reason or the start of it all until weeks, months later, his throat still dry. Everything plays on a loop in his own brain, one thing leading to the other until he realizes it's no use. He will go mad trying to find a reason and often does, in the middle of the night: it started with the pain in his back, and then the nightmares he wanted to subdue. Then, on his honeymoon, he numbed his mouth from calling out Mary's name. And when he came back, only to realize she was gone. Only to realize later, how really gone she was, in love with another man. Yet, he and Lavinia–
So, you see, it really could drive him mad if he allowed it to–his own mind, his own need for answers. So he lets it go. He lets it go and when his father comes to him now in dreams at night, at first, just as before, there are no words shared between them. But then, one night, months after his last drink, he wakes up, feeling his father's hand on his shoulder and he knows, somehow, it will all be all right again.
It will never be what he once wished. It will never be what he once dreamed. But it will be all right: this he learns from his father in the dreams without recriminations. There is hope for something else, something never imagined.
His friends, the men at work, look at him differently. Behind his back they may say things like: cuckold by a woman, I say, man! But to his face they are all docile smiles because though things might not be so rosy in their own gardens a divorce: good god, salt! (even now he cannot rid Mary completely from his head or his heart; he can only accept that she is there with their shared memories and jokes, even if he the only one truly there to laugh). He is made different by the divorce, in their eyes.
But Robert puts his arm around Matthew again, recognizing him again, calls him, "My dear chap" again. His mother forgives him without words or tears. Even Violet appears to thrum up some respect for him, someway, somehow.
And each day, he wakes up in the center of his bed, limbs all flung out, alone, beginning again.
It is Violet who tells him, which shouldn't make much sense except that Robert can be a coward too. Tonight he would not meet Matthew's eyes. So Violet asks if Matthew will walk her to the door, she leans on him a bit more heavily than usual, as if she needs him, gripping his forearm. "You know," she says at last, "you know Mary will come for Edith's wedding."
"I know," Matthew tells her.
"We are all...things have not gone the way we could have predicted, Cousin Matthew," Violet continues as they wait for her car. "But you've righted them, haven't you?"
He allows her a small smile. "Well, I haven't spilled anything on you in sometime."
"Yes," she allows him a smile in return. "Quite some time, now that you mention it. Only, now that Mary is coming–"
"Excuse me," Matthew whispers and clenches his jaw, not out of anger but because he must get these words out. "Cousin Mary is married to Mackenzie, something I have long come to terms over in the recent year and I..."
Oh, Matthew. What am I always telling you? You must pay no attention to the things I say. Even a year later, her tears and her braid come back to him, specters in his memory while he stinks of drink.
"To be honest, Cousin Violet, I love her and I think I always shall. But we won't ever be together, will we? I've made sure of that. And now the only thing to be done is make sure that she is happy and if Mack is the one to make her so...then. Even if he wasn't the one to make her so...I know for certain I never can."
"Oh, my dear," Violet whispers wretchedly in the dark without recrimination. Her hand slips from his wrist, to his hand, where she squeezes. He can practically feel her bones through the thinness of her skin and the lace of her glove. He is suddenly aware that someday she will die; they will wear black for her and lament the loss of her but who will capture the essence that is Violet? Who will say just the right thing at the right moment? He thinks of his father, the last three years of his own life, and he knows that nothing lasts forever. Nothing good or bad lasts forever, not people, things, or memories, not even love.
What can be said in such a fragile, hushed moment? Only something irreverent, as Violet herself would say. "And don't worry about your frocks. I'll only spill if someone trips me."
"My good man," Violet whispers so quietly, Matthew thinks he may have imagined it.
This is Matthew's life now.
He wakes in the middle of the bed, on his back, all spread out, feet flung from beneath the covers, as if he is an overgrown child or as if he is trying to fill the whole space of the bed by himself. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. He wipes the sleep out of his eyes. He feels everything–the sheets on his back, where his pajama top rode up during the night; dryness on the pads of his fingertips; cold air on his toes.
When he sees her (after work, dressing, the walk to Downton), he makes sure that his eyes go first to Mack's face. Though this is very hard, it is the first test. He shakes the man's hand and this is hard too, though not impossible. "Welcome back to Downton," he tells Mary's husband. He allows his eyes to glance towards her, allows himself a single nod. His voice is warm (but not too warm), welcoming (but not too welcoming), when he says, "Cousin Mary." His chin dips at the end of her name.
"Cousin Matthew," she replies. He does not analyze her voice for secret messages to be decoded later. "How very fine you look." She pauses. He does not think of what such a pause could mean except that it is an absence of sound. "You have survived Edith's wedding preparations admirably well."
He smiles, averting his eyes to somewhere the left of her face.
They do not touch. He never really sees her.
This is Matthew's life now.
A/N: Just a warning in general...some rough tide ahead. I appreciate you all and all the support you've given me and the story. I know this chapter is fuzzy...The less fuzzy I made it, the less realistic it seemed. Anyway, I don't have much else to say today...Rough tides in the story and in real life.