CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE NEXT MORNING
A knock. I look up from the page to Seamus' sour face looming in the open doorway. His hair is a bright cinnamon when it's wet.
"Help me with this wire or it's taking the whole day," he says.
I don't want to. For once in my life I'd rather be inside. I'm reading. It's warm in here. The last place I want to be is out in the rain. And his Help me felt more a command than a request. I receive more than my share of commands from Agnes already. I hunch my shoulders and frown at him. "Does it really need to be-"
He sighs and turns back to the stairwell. "Just come an help. Give you something to do beside stare at that table."
"I'm- "
He's walking away. His voice is unnecessarily loud. "Or stand about in windows."
I wince and push my chair back. Shame, the great mobilizer. The fold of the curtain hid me, I'd thought. I follow his sleek wet head down the hall.
.
The night before I couldn't fall asleep. Downstairs the clock chimed the hours hollowly through the dark and I lay there, listening, eyes open. Finally the bed pushed me back out of it. I gave up, I walked around my room, I went to the window. Watched the stars in the clear night. Watched owls sailing like kites into the stable. Saw their wide shadows glide up the barn wall, rise to meet and join them, disappear together into the black square of the hayloft. Watched Easy grazing, a darkness passing slowly across the pasture. Watched a hare zigzag up toward the garden, the tall grass waving. But mostly I watched the cottage, without thinking, without any intention behind my eyes, almost unseeing, while my mind dug roughly through its concerns.
And then a light in the cottage window. Just a brush of gold moving through the room. A candle. Next a brighter blossoming as he lit the lantern. His shadow crossing the window. Up late. Restless, like me. I watched the tumble of shadow on the wall as he did whatever it was. Then the cottage door opened and he emerged, dressed, holding the lantern so that most of what I saw were his bowlegged trousers and the tops of his boots lit against the path. He's coming up to the house, I thought. He needs something, something is wrong. He's sick. A spasm of worry, an urge to help him. Instead he turned his back to me and I watched, astonished, as his swaying gait carried him, half-lit, into the woods.
I stood at the window and kept watch for a long time, rubbing my knuckle against my top lip. What visit required such late hours? Had he taken the path out to the village road, I might've followed. But he'd headed south past the back fields. Into the wood. Why?
The stars turned. I waited. My feet went numb. An hour, maybe.
From deep in the woods a tiny glow. The lantern coming back, tipping with his walk, a swinging firefly.
The cottage door opened. Ivory spread over the walls as he hung up the lantern. Framed in the small slice of window I watched his blurry silhouette peel off its sweater, tussle with it, drape it inside-out from the pothook above the stove. Rub its hands through its hair. Bend and reappear. His trousers now hanging from the pothook too. For a moment his shape turned abruptly towards me, as if I'd called out to him. We faced each other, both in our frames like two portraits. Then he turned away, equally abruptly, to reach for the lantern. I watched his face light up, become solid and real. As he twisted the wick down I saw clearly the hollows of his temples, his bare shoulders, his wet hair tousled. But then the light sucked itself back down into the lantern's glass bulb, the cottage went dark, and he was gone.
.
The rain isn't too cold but it's the sort of fine, dense blanket that floats sideways in gusts. Seamus is drenched. I'm hunched halfway in the windbreak of his body as he shows me how he's tying the branches of the espalier to its wiring with bits of rag. My eyes watch his hands but my mind is in the night before, calculating. Small wonder he's irritable. His voice has the thickened drag of fatigue. Where did he go? It's not like him to be out late. He rises early, sleeps early. At dawn he's in the kitchen before Rosalind, fixing himself a solitary first meal. By sunset he's ready to drop. Every evening in my library I watch his eyes glaze over across the board, watch him deploy his last energy. He does love to play chess. But it's his resolution to win, to beat me, that keeps him upright in that chair. What was out there in the dark last night that was so similarly gratifying? What need, or fear, or duty, carried him into the woods?
Or desire, I think; of course there is also desire.
Also there was the matter of the expression on his face in the lamplight when he returned. A curious satiated blankness. I recognized it. Another person might have described it as inanimate, perhaps; a descriptor which itself is telling in its irony.
.
I can't ask him about any of this, of course. Instead I pace backwards toward him, wire spooling out from the roll I hold at my chest. He's waiting, sitting high atop the trellis' crossbar, one boot tucked behind it for balance. He's hatless. Rain gutters off of his brow. Funnels into his eyes. He doesn't seem to register it. Myself, I have to keep wiping my face in the crook of my sleeve if I want to see.
He lifts the spool out of my hands with a grimace that says I am less help than he'd hoped for. It's in this moment as I'm handing it up to him that I notice it: The rain is coming fast now. Pelting us. But he isn't squinting as I am. The drops hit his open eyes, fill them, roll from them like tears. He doesn't even notice. Nor does he blink. I don't know that I've ever seen anything like it before.
Perhaps it's merely a trick you learn while at sea, I don't know. But it sparks another thought, a memory: his tousled wet head last night shining glossy in the lantern's glow. He'd dried it with his sweater. After coming home from his walk, a secretive late walk through a clear and cloudless night.