CHAPTER EIGHT
Agnes has turned back in the doorway, and Seamus and I are walking abreast to the house. Up to this moment I've been astonishingly naive.
His shoulder jostles mine and I look at him. He's squinting, and points his chin toward something over my shoulder.
"Look at that. Turn you mad, couldn't it?" he asks me, softly.
I look back. Low in the sky the moon has just risen, a brilliant oblong disc sitting atop the fields. My breath stills at the implication in his words and I swivel to face him, incredulous.
"A fine spring night like this," he clarifies, but one eyelid dips in the faintest of winks. I stop short and he strides away from me, laughing to himself, swinging the jug.
A trick. I've fallen for it. Obviously he's heard the rumor. I think of the driver of the hire-car. Even worse, Rosalind. I shake my head and follow his loping bowlegged form through the glowing dusk. Send him away, I think to myself, even as I know that I won't. Then stop him before it goes further, I say to myself. You know how this can end.
But how to stop him? He should be afraid, and he isn't. It's possible that somewhere he's heard the rumor and since then he's been waiting, sharpening it to use against me. If anyone's afraid, it should be him, shouldn't it?
Once when I was younger I caught a rabbit in the orchard with my bare hands. It was fun, the chase, the final triumphant grab. To this day I can recall the shock I felt when the soft little bundle of fur wriggled backwards in my grip to bite me, hard, a pinch of sharp yellow teeth, blood running down my palm. Same shock I feel now.
.
At the back step we stop to scrape our boots. Through the doorway a wave of heat pours out from the kitchen. I can't help the fact that I am shaken. As I stand on one foot to scrape the other, I stumble a little.
A hand catches the small of my back. I freeze. The hand stays firm. For a full beat we are perfectly still. His face is averted, expressionless; then, with a deliberate silence, he leans in to me, presses, pushes me gently through the doorway into the hall, then turns away toward the warm light and clatter of cutlery in the kitchen.
.
In the dark of the hall I'm suspended in a state of compressed panic. No one saw him touch me, I don't think. And I don't understand what is happening, other than that I am being manipulated.
I hang up my coat, pull a sweater over the stained shirt. My heart is beating fast in my throat. I'm both too hungry and too late to wash. Agnes is waiting at the table; I apologize to her and force myself to breathe slowly as I sit down. I can still feel where his hand has been.
Agnes and I have always eaten our meals here in the dining room while Rosalind has hers alone in the kitchen. Now Seamus eats at the small kitchen table with her, and I can hear their laughter echoing through the paneled wall behind me. I recognize this new sourness in my chest for what it is: jealousy. This windowless room with its dark velvet, these twelve always-empty seats at the acre of table beside us; something about this room makes any meal taste dusty. In contrast the kitchen is sun-yellow, battered, comfortable, saturated with Rosalind's busy cheer. If I had it my way no one would use this mausoleum of a room at all. If I had it my way I would be in the kitchen. If I had it my way... A low rumble through the wall; I wish I could hear what he's saying to her.
"Henry," someone says. I look up. Agnes has been speaking and is frowning at me. "Where are you? I said, tomorrow evening will be tricky. You'll need to be careful." She means, of course, the Lenten full moon.
I say nothing. I'm hungry and still shaken, eating too quickly to be polite, burning my tongue. I don't want to talk. I don't want to think.
Her frown deepens. She's set down her knife and one ridged, milky fingernail is tapping the linen. "I've never told you, but now that we've less privacy, I believe you should be aware." She clears her throat. "You look different before it happens. If one pays attention they can tell, and that's one more reason you must be careful."
I don't believe it. "Different, how?"
She tilts her head to the side, speculatively, peering at me. I tilt mine to match hers and she snorts, shakes her head.
"Well, it's not easy to describe. You look a bit as though someone's sharpened you."
I laugh. "Sharpened me?"
She nods. "With a knife. I don't know how else to say it, but that's just how you look."
And that is exactly how it feels: fresh, raw, peeled away. As though the moon skins me a bit to reveal the prickling fur underneath. I lean back in my chair and regard her.
"There's something else that needs to be said. I know you won't mind me speaking plainly, as you're a grown man." She meets my eyes levelly but her face is flushed. "I... fear that you have mistaken something for what it is not. I understand, and I do empathize. But it appears to me that you are trying to... " she hesitates, "solve a problem using inappropriate means."
I grimace at her. "What are you saying?"
"It's obvious you're trying to cultivate a friendship."
I look away without meaning to. There's no rebuttal to this.
"I've watched you accommodating that man's behavior. But we don't know him. More to the point, he doesn't know you. What happens when he finds out?" She sets her narrow shoulders. "I don't believe he can be compelled to behave with discretion," she says.
This, unfortunately, is the crux of the matter. She's right; he couldn't, and what he'd do if he found me out is anyone's guess. And she's nearly right about what I'm trying to cultivate. Just now I'm grasping at his friendship like a man in a well reaching for a rope, but what I actually want from him is so unrealistic I can't admit it.
Because I will not, Agnes, with her customary brutality, does it for me. She fixes her gaze somewhere above my head. "I have an idea what it is that you feel is missing from your life, Henry." When she blushes even the whites of her eyes seem to redden. "But I don't think it will be simple to find, and I certainly don't believe it can be found in Mr. Tulloch."
To soften the blow she reaches across the table to touch her hand to mine for a moment. I look at it, tiny and fragile, a little hen's claw. She is what family I have. I can't help but love her, as she loves me, even for all the damage we do to each other in the name of unconditional love.
.
There has never been any question of my marrying. For the most part my forebears have managed it, in spite of our malady- there's the title in our favor, and for what it's worth, the Brack profile, whose fierceness is somehow, generously, regarded as agreeable. I could, if I chose, marry the third cousin whose portrait photographs keep coming by post, just by answering her letters. But I ignore them as I ignore the glances I receive in the city and on the train.
One afternoon, not long before I came to Harthome, the cook brought her sister's son out to the villa. We were of an age but he was half a foot shorter, far less sophisticated, and far more enjoyable to talk to. Contrary to how I perceived him at the time, I suppose he was homely. He had big feet, tufty white-blond hair, and a face like a good-natured potato. In the sitting room, under everyone's eye, we underwent an official, clumsy introduction complete with handshake, established in a mutter that we had mutual interests (my slingshot, freedom) and mutual dislikes (the sitting room), and then complained until we were released out the back door into the wilds. It was a phenomenal afternoon. I lost my voice from shouting. But then at one point we found a robin's nest lying in the grass. Somehow during our efforts to replace it in the tree, somewhere in the breathless moment of propping up him up while he crept out on the thin limb, his face screwed up, shaking with the strain of not falling, the little nest trembling in his reaching hand- looking at him, I felt something matching up inside myself, like a knot being tied. I didn't have a word for the feeling but it was overwhelming. I was shy of him the rest of the evening. I laughed too quickly at his jokes. Could not look him in the eye. Gave him my new pocketknife and then an awkward punch on the shoulder. It grew dark eventually and we heard his aunt calling him back in for their walk home, and the sound her voice was like a bell tolling, a spell breaking. As the dark tunnel of the evening lane swallowed up his cheerful, goodbye-waving hand, an enormous sense of loss wrapped itself around me, and I was miserable for some reason I could not name.
My mother and Agnes could, which is why he was never invited again.
.
We eat the rest in a thoughtful silence. She rises and comes around to peck me on the forehead, leaving most of her plate untouched. I reach over for it as I listen to her light step tap slowly up the stair. The problem, of course, is that what I am missing has been very simple to find. It knocked when Mr. Tulloch did, and when I answered it crept in the door with him. Now it has filled my home and there is no escape from it.
The back door closes, and I hear Rosalind calling him good-night. Then the house is quiet but for her soft singing over the creak of the kitchen pump, the clatter of bowls.
I stare up at the ceiling above my bed, yellow and flickering in the candlelight. Through it I can see the moon as clearly as though the old plaster were parchment paper. I touch my face, think of what Agnes said. Pull down the blanket, pull away my clothes. Feel the weight of the invisible light pressing against my skin. Almost the same as being touched.