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She thought it was new films that made her feel old, or music, watching vinyl becoming tape becoming the flimsy iridescent CD-ROMs they sold bootlegs on in clamshells on the street. It was not. It was watching businesses shutter. By forty she'd come to realise she possessed a mental map of a city that was would always be years out of date. From there it only slipped further. These days she tended to give up and consult Google before she went out to eat.
Gertrude had only been in London a few days this time: scarce time to haul her things out of storage and update her linens. The blinds were too dark as well, she thought dimly. She could do with more natural light. Now she was back from her errands, only a little jet-lagged, new Ikea curtains bundled in her arms when she tilted open the Venetian blinds one last time, wandered through the kitchen, and set the answerphone to play--
"Hello, Gertrude."
Was this what she got for ignoring her mobile? Without really thinking, she leaned against the counter to listen.
He always had the same way of opening a message. Ruder than a stranger and more formal than a friend.
"I understand that you're back in the UK for the time being. I hope you're doing well and that your travels have been all that you've hoped."
She took a bottle of Perrier from the refrigerator and uncorked it absently. On the answerphone some thirty-six hours previous, Elias Bouchard cleared his throat and went on, "I'd like to meet. What do you say to Nino's, at half past six pm? --I want to catch up. I'd also like to discuss an opportunity with you. Phone or e-mail me and let me know. Thank you."
The carbonation tasted sharper cold. Gertrude let the messages play through--a few automated utilities messages, an old call from Michael Shelley--and thought for a while.
Eventually she reached for the landline's receiver and dialled.
He answered on the third ring. That was very like him--but he didn't say anything, or pretend he was unsure of who was calling. For a moment they waited on either end of the line.
Then Gertrude sighed: "Elias?"
"I suppose you got my message," he said. His voice had a quality of appreciation to it, or relief, but very mild. A muted colour. He was not an expressive man.
"I did." She cradled the receiver to her shoulder and started to unpack her laptop-- "Elias-- Nino's doesn't exist any more. It's all shops on that street now."
His silence was a startled one. She left him to it and thought about Nino's too: which hadn't existed there for her natural lifetime, or even her working life, and she'd been fool enough to believe that was protection against it closing. It was one thing for old cafes to die--another one for the new generation, the replacement. The stuff you were magnanimously getting used to.
And Nino's fixed the right blend of cream soda, and sold panini. Maybe Elias was mulling over the same things and maybe he wasn't; he mulled only briefly, anyway, and then: "Damn. All right, what about Baker's Dozen? Is that still in business?"
"Are you seriously asking me to check?"
This got a laugh from him, a little bark through the line. "Fair point. Half past six still?"
Half past seven, she was tempted to tell him, just to be bothersome. But in fact she had nothing better to do. Neither did he. Any haggling they did here would just be papier-mache over the lack of anything better to do that either of them had. She balanced the receiver, and logged into her user account, and said: "I'll try to be punctual."
In fact, she was early. In younger times she favoured fashionably late, because it was sullen: also, because she was often late by accident, and could pretend it was also fashionable. Now she tended to be on-time, but this time she sat down early so she could choose the table--nothing fancy or Machiavellian, Elias just liked to sit further in and she liked to be by the door, closer to the street and the sun, and he was shameless about getting his way if he got there first.
She also wanted to take in the sight of Baker's Dozen: a circa-1999 establishment she'd never thought she'd become fond of. The coffee was 'all right,' she remembered deciding; now she was pondering how many all-right Baker's Dozen coffees she'd bought over the past seven years.
It was still just all right. But she tried to commit the cafe to memory.
He, though, was obnoxiously punctual. There was really no point for him in not being. He appeared in his spring-autumn jacket, light and designed to repel the rain and wind without crumpling an Oxford, and shrugged out of it almost immediately; with a smile to her he folded it over the back of the chair opposite and sat down. The server, circulating, took note of him but didn't come over immediately.
He studied her, and she him--she realised with a start that he had tipped over the crest of ageing while she was gone. That was silly, technically; people were always ageing (well, sort of, in his case). But Elias Bouchard was a dissonantly youthful shell. It had distracted her for long enough that she was shocked to see the wear on him. The colourless flecks in his hair. His features, pretty in their way, had sharpened and were sharpening.
Elias grimaced. "Do you know that Nino's is the bottom storey of a god-damned H&M?"
It was her turn to laugh. She picked up the menu on the pretence of reading it. "In pace requiescat," she said. "Gentrification will outlive us all. You really ought to look just outside of your building from time to time, you know. Lest you become a historical site."
"Then I'll sell myself exorbitantly to a developer. Perhaps I'll live again as a multiplex. --Oh, they have a croque madame. I think I shall, in fact." He dropped the laminated menu, having selected his sandwich, and smiled at her again. Unbidden and, in his way, artless. Artless and tone-deaf were almost always the same thing for him. "How have you been?"
She could not smile, then; and seeing that, his faded too. Not wholly. There was a light in his expression, she knew, that was not in hers. A light that said, in spite of the silence--you came to see me all the same.
Gertrude looked away.
The server came and took their orders (the croque madame; the banh mi) and deposited coffees in front of them. She doctored hers with cream. "I've been well," she said.
In China and America. Chasing the end of the world. What was the point in saying? She lifted her coffee--Elias lifted his (black) and drank. "That's good," he said.
She had nothing to say to that either.
Elias glanced into his cup, like he was divining from it. His eyes unfocused into the middle distance and she wondered what he was looking at. The trouble was, there was no real tell, was there? It could be something; it could just be the expanse of his own thoughts. His mind was boundless, and there was no neat division between the ordinary and the beyond. Or rather, there was no ordinary. There was just him.
"I remember what you used to order at Nino's," he said. "Bresaola with rocket--"
"Yes. You'd have the prosciutto. What are we doing here, Elias?"
His eyes creased, genuine fondness along his laughter lines. "So you remember too."
"Need I remind you again that you are not the only being on this planet in possession of a long-term memory?"
"I'll try to remember in future," he said, and folded his napkin across his lap; he was a sedate man by ordinary mannerisms, and confined his animation to a small imaginary box around his person. She thought this was a function of the time that he'd been born into: perhaps his temperament, too, but also his time. He was boned through with steel. There was no getting him to slouch. "Gertrude-- I would like it if you came with me to the Vitality Charity Gala this year. I know that it's been some time--"
"Elias," she interrupted--on unhappy impulse, like it might stop him.
"There's nothing riding on this. I'm not trying to search something out from you, and I'll drop you home." Here he was crisp: his tone had suddenly detached from him and he was his bland, businesslike self. "It's the sort of thing that looks well if we both make an appearance. I've been making excuses for you but I wouldn't like it to seem that you and I are feuding, or you're in poor health."
"No, neither of those things, certainly." Gertrude raised her eyebrows.
Elias sighed. "You won't have to talk to anyone unpleasant. I'll manage that. Gertrude, do consider that this isn't much to ask."
He was wrong about that. He wasn't lying, not here: he just never did know what he was asking.
Nino's had been a first of theirs, but just one. They'd littered the earthly world with their firsts. No, they'd scarred it.
She remembered Nino's, though, because she'd been a few years over thirty and it was the first time Jonah Magnus had moved his unearthly self, in the flesh, to track her down. She hadn't even appreciated it. His name, then, was James--actually, to her his name was Mr Wright, though he was starting to make his first cracks in that: he didn't say no, call me James (that would have been inappropriate in the early seventies) but he'd dropped Miss Robinson in favour of Gertrude some time back. Which was only appropriate at this point, honestly. They worked late nights together over the same table; they'd fought off the same attacks back to back. They'd puzzled over the same maps. Some early mornings she slept on the sofa, of the same office where he worked, tireless. Gertrude was inevitable.
It was her own boundary, coy, cross, that she drew with Mr Wright: crisply when he pulled out a chair for her or interrupted her work. All her childish postures.
On this particular October day she was cold-shouldering him because she was especially cross, and she didn't go into the office for a week. She didn't even pick up the telephone. What is James going to do about it? she remembered thinking, defiant (though in truth she was using the day off for laundry). Bother me at my flat? He wouldn't dare.
He didn't. He bothered her at the laundrette. One moment she turned, basket in her arms, and there he was: wearing tweed and his necktie a few machines down without even the faintest pretence of laundry. She yelled in undignified surprise and clutched her basket; James winced and put his hands up immediately in the universal sign for calm down, I'm harmless! This didn't make things look any less weird.
Gertrude glared at him. The whole incident had ruffled her composure and she decided her recompense was the right to glare. "Mr Wright, what on earth are you doing here?"
"Obviously looking for you. Could you keep your voice down," he hissed, looking over his shoulder. A few of the older women were giving him man-harassing-a-young-lady looks.
Gertrude thought this was really his own problem. Nevertheless, she lowered her voice, also to a hiss: "Mr Wright. You have to admit this is ridiculous."
"I would never dream of disputing that." The look he gave her indicated that he had a differing opinion on whose fault this was.
"You can't come to someone's laundrette. I'm not even going to explain why that's inappropriate."
"You can't not show up for work because you're in some sort of fuss. This is not scheduled time off."
In spite of everything, she was becoming morbidly curious about how far he would go to try to frame this within normal employment terms. It was frankly making him sound more disturbed to the other launderers in the vicinity. James looked like he knew it; the glances he shot the people around him were uneasy, and he'd even brought his hand up to his neck. Gertrude took pity: "Hold this basket," she instructed him, and gave him the basket to hold. It had the appearance of detente--strangers went back to their business as Gertrude went back to retrieving wet clothing from a washer. "You can't come to someone's laundrette," she said again, in a calmer voice. "I appreciate your dedication, as always, but you're going to have to learn how to behave a bit more like a normal person if you want to make inroads with me. Or anyone else."
"Thank you for the interpersonal lesson." The tone he adopted was both weary and sarcastic, but she suspected he was taking notes. "Very well. Let's go somewhere else, then."
"You may note that I'm not here for the scenery."
When she glanced back he'd offloaded the basket onto an empty dryer, and she was treated to the sight of James Wright leaning against a machine in a laundrette with his arms crossed and one foot resting on the other. It was, frankly, almost worth the trouble. "Very well," he said again. "Let's go somewhere else after you're finished with your clothes."
He walked with her back to her building, and waited decorously downstairs while she went up to the roof to hang her clothes to dry. Then they went to Nino's to talk. They hadn't served bresaola then.
She'd known so little about him then. At least then she was aware of it. She'd been an arrogant thirty-two: a credulous and naive thirty-two, a gullible one. She'd had some idea of this, and compensated by being wary. As though wariness did anything for her, aside from give her a false sense of security when she finally, finally let it down. And she always did. It was too heavy to carry for long.
"You can't expect me just to work for you," she told him over the cafe table, "like this is a normal job. It isn't. I don't know what you think about people, but they can't actually put their heads down and pretend like everything's the same after they learn about something like this."
James had his head resting on one hand; he was listening, in fact, and up to this point was doing quite admirably at not interrupting. Here, though, his eyebrows shot up: "I'm going to have to contradict you there, Gertrude--"
"Yes, I can see it pains you."
"--but if you're speaking of people as a generality--a demographic--" He gestured, dismissively, with his free hand. "--they can do that. They absolutely can. But I can see that you can't."
What was sitting across from her, in her own thirty-two-year-old opinion? An evil man. A despicable priest, or magician--warlock, sorcerer, probably Weird Tales had a few more synonyms if she looked--of an appallingly callous faith. A man of a frightening power: something between a mentalist and a diviner. But the truth was, Gertrude didn't see that. It was what she tried to hold in her mind. She saw her boss, James Wright: late forties, broad, handsome if going a little to seed. With a smile touched with the most aggravating condescension. She didn't want to slay him; she wanted to have the last word.
But this was very difficult. As it turned out, he also tended to have a death grip on the last word. Gertrude sighed. "Don't try to flatter me," she said.
"I'm not flattering you. I'm asking you to come back to work."
"Asking? Is it a question?"
"Yes." He surprised her with the quickness and force of his answer.
Later--knowing what she knew--she would wonder. Here, at Nino's, she ate a sullen meal and then they went back to the Institute.
Her tame years were few; by now she was already starting to do things her own way. She'd not yet given up taking her own statements, but she was playing utilitarian tit-for-tat with James all the time: saying "no" and "no, that's monstrous" but also "and what would you do if I did?" She was always extracting compromise from him: no, unless you ask the Lukas Foundation to release those people. Well, maybe, if you tell me where I can find that church. He seemed to find it at turns a troublesome necessity--very well, Gertrude--and deeply aggravating. Sometimes she grinned at him when she got her way. Eric always rolled his eyes, watching her. --Eric understood more than she admitted, didn't he?
It took her a year or two past that to realise that what she was doing wasn't extorting James. It was asking him for help. And she was getting it, too.
She remembered sitting up late in James's upstairs office with him--wired with purpose, herself, and he never seemed to sleep--as she paced and ruled out theories and suppositions about their enemies' plans, and he offered up input. A typical scene for them. He was still immaculate; she wasn't, her hair was down, but she never leaned against his desk, much less sat on it. Obscurely she thought this was some sort of boundary.
This time, though, their theorising had turned to a quarrel. This was common, because James could offend a paper plate if you left him to his own devices. His default setting was 'tonally inappropriate.' In the middle of it he'd said the words--"and subsidising your heroics--"
"Heroics?" She spat it back, mocking. He glanced at the ceiling; and she was hit with the shock that he was right. This endeavour, this underworld, was monstrous: but she was engaged in helping people. He was not. He was engaged, sometimes, in helping her.
Their victories were her victories: that was her first thought in her moments of grim triumph, sometimes her own blood in her hair. It wasn't his blood. He never swooped down for her like a knight; he just stayed on his row of their chessboard, all the way in the back, castled in. She knew they were his victories anyway; she acted under his seal, carried his hand. The creatures that were afraid of her were afraid of them both. Their victories were their victories.
Once Gertrude came back from a tangle with the Dark. She was half-concussed and her ears wouldn't stop ringing, but she'd won; and, sitting in James's office chair, she let him pull her hair aside and play nursemaid. "Maxwell Rayner says hello," she said, smiling.
James's fingertips touched an abrasion on the side of her neck, then her ear and the nape. He smiled too: not paternalistic, but with a gleam of malice. A criminal's smile. The first time she saw it.
She must have been wearing it too.
"Does he?" said James. "Well, I hope you gave him our best."
"Of course," she said with a laugh. Victor's delight, or concussive injury. She was dizzy with it.
She went home without telling Elias anything about the Vitality Gala, one way or another. It wasn't for another five days, anyway, and he'd sort out her RSVP whether he made complaining noises about it or not. He had some sort of anti-disorder of executive function, anyway; he found some sort of solace in sorting out badly organised logistics. It was his little zen garden. And he'd keep bothering her for her answer until then.
Gertrude lay on her mattress, staring up, and wondered if she was really considering an answer of no. One thing she had stopped doing over the years was pretending she was deliberating over things she wasn't actually giving any consideration. Oh, she still pretended to others: that was just boundaries. But to herself, she tried to be honest. This time she wasn't entirely sure.
She didn't want to do it. The idea of going out with him cut her deep, or pulled on either edge of a deep cut. But she felt utterly weary of gaining and losing ground with him, of territorial battles. Of deals.
Maybe that was what he really had over her, in eternal life. She'd always jested that he was not eternally young, but rather eternally old: just increasingly and superlatively decrepit. It wasn't all jest. But if Jonah had a mainspring, steely and tireless, it was for conflict. He could pick anyone else down to the bone.
And--she could be honest, couldn't she? It was a change. She always wore the same old things nowadays.
I'll go, she told him, but over text message. The least romantic assent she could muster.
Thank you. It's black tie, so expense it if you need to. --well, he could always do her one better.
In fact she didn't need to expense much: just new shoes, and having her hair done at a salon. Out with your husband? said the enthusiastic girl working on her updo, and Gertrude half-smiled and said, out with my boss, and the girl looked uncertain. She still had two appropriate gowns that fit her: an embroidered A-line in dark satin, and a gem-blue mermaid-silhouette dress she remembered that he liked. She had the embroidered gown dry-cleaned.
"You always used to call it the Mortality Gala," she said to him over the telephone. "Now I'm finally old enough to fit in."
"Yes, I remember hearing about how I must have plucked you directly from the cradle. Aren't you fond of our busybody industry?"
"It's not an industry, Elias, it's a field." In spite of herself, she smiled: just fondness. Unguarded. It didn't matter. "And you wouldn't have to had to hear about it if you didn't insist on listening in."
He gave a grunt, chastened. "Well, you know me."
Certainly she did. She wondered what jewelry she had left to choose from: well, not much. One thing didn't say more than another, regardless; they were all from him.
For all their banter, though, she sat and made him wait, for a few minutes, when he came to get her. He wasn't entirely pretentious (or rich); he drove his own car.
Gertrude watched him get out of it, sitting on the ottoman at the foot of her bed. She put on her new flats and bent her legs. She stared into the mirror.
She went out to meet him and he smiled. It was a dazzling look on him, obviously--a foregone conclusion, because he was a man always at his best in the finest things. The world had been shown mercy, frankly, by his love for the most horrific and professorial fabrics. Even Jonah Magnus didn't look a king in a jacket with leather elbow-patches. But every so often he was turned loose.
Elias had hit an age of a certain easy authority, so the boyishness and delicacy in his features just made him look down-to-earth. That was an illusion. He grinned to see her--whatever he saw--and stepped forward impulsively to take her by both hands. This familiarity she permitted; however, his eyes were bright with something and he tried to draw her closer. This she didn't. She drew back, first gently then sharply when he didn't let go; and the grin faded and was overcast.
The brightness was still there, though. She really couldn't abide it. "Why are you bringing me to this?" she said.
He blinked: "I wanted to see you. Also, it's both of our organisation at this point, really, and I thought you still deserved the credit for your work. You were always on about that in the past--"
"Elias," she said sharply, not in the mood.
"Very well. It looks better for the Institute to make more of a serious appearance at these things, to make up for the ones we don't attend." He extended his arm; she took it. "And I'd have to take someone."
"And that someone is me?"
"Well, Peter's not much of a social butterfly, now, is he?" He gave her a look.
They got in the car and she contemplated not answering at all, turning her face to the window and the passing lights. That seemed more petulant, though. Or maybe she was just bored. Boredom and silence got more cruelty out of her than anything else, sometimes. "I wasn't aware you'd describe me as a butterfly, Elias. I think the last term you used was 'child.' Or perhaps it was adjectival: 'childish.'"
He looked annoyed, just as she'd known he would, at being pipped at the post to calling her childish. He couldn't well do it now. They exchanged a look. "You're certainly more of one than Peter," he said, anticlimactically.
They drove in silence, for a time. She was starting to remember how uncomfortable beautiful dresses were, and dreading the reminder about beautiful shoes as well.
There was an edge of humiliation for her too. The clothing she put on to seem unassuming, nonthreatening, was not what she would choose for herself in a life of self-expression: but neither was this. She hated this sort of performance, for someone else's benefit. Worse that it wasn't even, really, for his. To be constantly underestimated was a day-to-day grind, to be sure; but was it worse than to be thought beautiful for her age? To pleasantly surprise? Sometimes that seemed the greatest temptation of immortality: people not measuring her mathematically. Her body invited so much arithmetic. No wonder the Lonely had an allure for some.
Elias, though, for his part--Elias knew her sorrow from her anger, and what both looked like. When they parked and he glanced at her, it was with something more muted, and dejected. Not so tireless after all, she thought. Not such a mainspring.
"Gertrude," he said. "What's wrong? I know this isn't your favourite, but it's not mine either. I know you're not happy with me, but that's not new. You're upset."
This was the kind of hapless bludgeon of an olive branch he was always trying to extend, emotionally speaking. She felt a little grudging of it, mainly because she knew it was their particular relationship that permitted him to do it. She was a woman, and she was upset; this was an accident of nature and a human inevitability, together, but it offered him a place of safety. He was always ricocheting off the rails when he was upset. That was an unacceptable state. She wondered how Peter Lukas endured him. But that was as unknowable to her, she knew, as anything. A road to nowhere.
Gertrude shook her head. "I'm not," she said, and it wasn't a lie: it was waning. "I don't hate your world as much as you think I do. I don't mind it so much. I like the food."
He waited, watching her.
"Let's not retread," she said. "There isn't any point. Shall we go in? People will think it's very kind of you, bringing me."
They got out in silence and she reached out for his arm again, but Elias surprised her with an answer: "Is that supposed to be self-pity?" he challenged her. "Now there's a game I'm not playing. You're so damned disingenuous, do you know that? The sun will be at the bottom of the ocean on the day that I," and he stared down at her here, "am in any position to take pity on you. You insufferably shameless creature."
Startled, she laughed. "You hopeless romantic."
"Now stop lying and let's go inside," he said and took her arm.
He proposed to her, the first time, when she was thirty-five. They had been a year together, which seemed--for year thirty-four--the most tumultuous and important year of her life, the way they always do; so it hadn't struck her as odd or sudden or impulsive, not really. Not the way it did when she looked back on it. It helped that in somewhat irreplaceable Jonah Magnus style, his first proposal really was a... proposal.
She was lying face-down and half-naked on her bed in jeans and a not-yet-hooked brassiere, halfway through dressing when she'd bored of it and flopped down on her stomach to peruse her South American travel guide again. He was dressed except for his tie, sitting on the edge of the bed tracing her spine with his fingers. Not tracing, precisely--counting, each vertebra from the base of her spine up. It was more distracting than she was pretending, still less distracting than the hotels of Argentina.
"We should be married," was what he said. "Don't start. It would make the most sense and simplify a great deal."
"What?" was what she had said. Ah, the salad days.
"I said you should marry me. Your family won't ask so many questions, we won't have to come up with so many lies--expensing would be a lot easier. I'm not expecting you to have children."
Gertrude stared up at him and he had looked away, sort of defencive. She, in fact, wasn't offended: nonplussed, yes, but not offended. In fact she found this sort of behaviour cute. One had to in order to take him as a lover. Or an anything. "Well, that's good," she said, at something of a loss. "I'm not having any children."
"Think about it," he said, like he was just proposing a holiday. And, still surprised, she let it drop.
He was the oldest man she'd ever been involved with--dated seemed inappropriate--even before she'd had the slightest notion how true that actually was. She'd lost her virginity anticlimactically to a film student at uni, and her first boyfriends had been after that: and though she hadn't been admitting it to herself, she'd been checking off a box. An entry on a list. Done, done: now you can't say I didn't try.
Her real decisions with men were all stupider decisions. Eric Delano when she was twenty-six, drunk after an office party; Eric Delano again when she was twenty-nine, for six months, a worse idea. And Jonah.
She could never quantify what she'd been attracted to in him, initially, because the truth was it'd been true since she'd met him. Since the interview, in some way.
She could quantify what she liked in him as a lover when they first started out. It was the inappropriateness of what he was doing--his sense of humour she didn't want to laugh at. The wicked edge of his grin. It mirrored her own. What did it say about a woman, she wondered? What kind of woman had been waiting all her life for a man that let down her pretences of guilt, of conscience?
James counted five vertebrae back down with his fingers; on the sixth, she turned over abruptly and pulled him back down with a fistful of his starchy Oxford. His triumph was marred by his alarm over his shirt.
She was stupid. She had scares, with him--clinic appointments she never told him about, and wondered if he knew. The idea of talking to him about that was unbearable, and she wondered if he knew that either: the brusqueness of his ways abraded more harshly when you had some of his tenderness to compare it to.
And she did have that. He proposed to three times, really, in his life, unless you counted some of his passive-aggressive bringing-it-up on other occasions: which really shouldn't be discounted. The second was closer to a real proposal; they had gone out to eat more socially, to talk work and gossip about the rise and fall of cults in their vicinity, and then they'd gone to walk through a market. He'd taken her by both hands, abruptly, near the water. He looked at her and said: "I'd still like you to marry me. You can think it over. As long as you'd like. I'm not going anywhere."
The cruelest things he said were in anger, usually; the next-cruelest were, years later, things that he'd never meant to be cruel at all. When she was miserable she would sometimes sit in the shower water and think about everything he had done to her life, and his voice would come to mind again--as long as you'd like. I'm not going anywhere.
In accuracy, she'd never left him. There was no leaving him. But Gertrude supposed she tried to leave him a few times before she really did manage. One of them was a fight named we can't keep doing these things; another one was a fight named you lied to me. (And that was before the greatest lies. You could always count on him to bury his lies layers deep.)
In another, they were shouting--and yes, she was forty-one, and even he was shouting--and she'd broken into tears. Her first tears of anger in front of him, amazingly. She'd been stubborn about that for years. Such dignity. Perhaps she could cash it in. "I don't have a world," she was saying to him. "I have yours. I've altered everything about my world to join you, and it's never even occurred to you to even consider doing the same for me. That's just the way you are. It's the way it's always been."
Gertrude had expected him to set her down icily, the way he often did. She was startled, tremendously, when he raised his voice even more. Elias Bouchard had a piercing voice when he cared to--but James Wright could shout, when he did, the kind of resonant bellow that a child loathed from their father.
"How would you know?" he said. "How in God's name would you know that? You have no idea. You have no idea," and she heard, unnerved, the choked quality in his throat, "what my life would be like if I'd never changed any of it for you."
In those days Gertrude held few of their conflicts in his favour: almost none, really. And she hadn't been entirely wrong. His selfishness had a gravitational force of its own. It always had. She thought about that, though; it was something she was helpless not to concede, as she grew older. He had so many vast ways of being--how could he not have been forced to alter them, to let in someone in the shape of her? It only made it worse.
Layers deep, lies: they fought over that too. At one point they were making up; or rather, she had cried, and they'd run out of steam to fight. They hadn't made up, but their armies were depleted. The consequences of attrition. He sat with his arms around her, and they both remained there, and didn't move. With great weariness he said eventually: "You can never be happy with me. You scratch and you scratch until you unearth what you're afraid to find."
Which was a hell of a way for a liar and a murderer and a deceiver to talk. And yet there was something in his voice when he said it, something so wretched and earnest, that she cried again. It was because it was so hapless. He meant it.
She remembered.
Gertrude had to admit that he'd been right about the Mortality Ball. She felt old, on a good day, but the sea of white and silver heads made her feel irritably young, or at least like she ought to be somewhere with a little more--well, vitality. Elias raised his eyebrows at her; she gave him a look and went off to survey the buffet tables.
The back foot of her mind was in pragmatism. An event at which both she and Elias were present was a wonderful event to attack, from an enemy's perspective. One blessing was that Elias had sprung this on her so suddenly: he was no fool, and had a keen and in fact undying sense of self-preservation. Sudden plans were difficult to plan around. The other blessing was that most of their enemies were catastrophically stupid. She'd become less paranoid once she realised how little time they spent trying to assassinate her versus in-fighting between themselves, or having money problems.
She considered the hors-d'oeuvres. Sooner or later anyone who frequented buffets got in the habit of devising reconnaissance and a plan of attack. The shrimp cocktail and the canapes looked good; there were soup tureens, but she didn't feel like waiting for them. Elias, for his part, was talking to some familiar faces, though she couldn't really be bothered to remember who they were. Nonprofit sorts of people. His playacting sphere was his affair, not hers.
Watching him from a distance, however, she could observe what he looked like to others. He was engaged in his present conversation, with two women from a theatre foundation: the sort of engaged that meant he couldn't send his mind roaming. There was a part of him that liked the chicanery of passing himself off as a legitimate researcher of an illegitimate subject, setting people to wondering what he was doing there at all; but, more than that, she thought he liked the company. He was lonely. The more time they spent apart, the lonelier he got.
But that was him. Only taking lovers who drifted away from him. Always trying to catch butterflies.
Don't all things drift away? she remembered Elias deflecting, some five or so years ago, on a similar topic.
She'd smiled. Not you.
When he offered her immortality--as good as a ring, she was aware, the only marriage that he would ever have accepted--he was always devising a new sales pitch. One that always came up was the unending experience of the world. He had lived over two centuries, he would tell her; he had read the most beautiful works of the English language in their first printing. He'd seen the sun set on the British Empire. He'd watched the world be ravaged and come through and be ravaged again. Others had lived longer than he had lived, he allowed; but no one had seen what he had seen. Did she want to miss the rest of it?
She didn't. It was alluring because it was true. And yet the allure faded, with time. As time went on and he grew desperate she instead grew to wonder about the times she never would see: his times. The ones she wasn't permitted to ask about. The last doors in the sanctum of his castles.
All he'd given from his first life were brush-offs and allusions. He didn't speak of Robert Smirke, though she could guess; once she remembered leaning against his shoulder, discussing something, and he said: we came up in a brutal time, Gertrude. Everyone in that generation. It wasn't one person or one thing; it was a way of living. Nostalgia always looks back to a time of gentlemen, but it's very much the opposite. Not that we had any idea. We didn't know anything else.
Truth on his face, for a moment, and then he was gone again. Shuttered. He did have a vast number of ways of being; but most of them were shuttered. She wondered if he knew that he was not the only one who spent his time fruitlessly looking.
Gertrude drifted back over to him with a glass of ice water and a mote of curiosity in her mind. As time went on, it was less about those things she wondered, and more things that her younger self would've been ashamed to ask. Certain he'd laugh at her for. Age brought apathy, however: "Elias. I have a question for an exceptionally old man."
"Goodness." He gave her a look over his own wineglass. "Well, it's good that you came here, then."
"What do you think of Romantics? The poets? People are always going back and forth on Byron and Shelley in contemporary pieces--'oh, they were regarded as silly at the time' or 'oh, they were geniuses.' Really something of a cultural battleground. I thought you'd be more of a primary source."
Elias studied her.
"To be honest, at the time I really didn't give them a moment's thought," he said. "Not in a derisive way. I just wasn't terribly in-touch."
It was a disappointing but, clearly, entirely honest answer; but when he walked her out onto the patio by the arm he turned, a shimmer of something in his expression, and said, "There was a time when poetry made me uncomfortable. I didn't fail to understand what it meant, but it addressed what I'd rather not address. Love and death, constantly: rather the preoccupations of the artists of my generation. But now they're gone. It's rather a comfortable distance, and I can appreciate the artistry. I've never been a very artistic man."
This was candour too, she could tell. She wondered if she agreed, looking up at him: perhaps he was not.
He collected butterflies.
"Love and death," she said, smiling. "Haven't you had enough of those?"
No one was looking: for her benefit, not his, she was aware. He put his hand out to touch her, maybe cradle her cheek, but she raised her own hand into its path. So instead he took that, and interlaced their fingers. "I'm giving you one more chance," he said, not yet extinguished.
"You've given me chances enough. Let's go inside."
The third time he asked--for her hand, in every way that mattered--he did get down on one knee. They had quarrelled too many times for a love affair to weather, and she'd tried to leave him three times: so, naturally, he tried to fix it by proposing. Some men did this with babies, or pets. She could have had something clever to say here, but she was taken aback--not that he still wanted her, but by the gesture. In all this time she realised that she'd still felt like his mistress, before this.
She was forty-three. She'd been unfaithful. He hadn't, not yet. More things to take for granted.
"Marry me," said Jonah. "I cannot promise you much of anything. But you have me. You can always have me. What else matters in this world, Gertrude? We can get everything else back. We have time."
"You always tell me that you and I shall never be finished with one another," she mused--or tried to muse, but her voice quavered. She tried to pull him to his feet, but he wouldn't get up. "So what's the use? If I'm shackled anyway?"
"We'll never be finished with one another." Jonah looked up at her, in what was becoming the older age of his body. Silver-haired and deep in the voice this time. "That doesn't mean we'll always be together. There are many worse things in-between."
There were.
She smiled down at him, red-eyed. "Get up," she said; and when he didn't, she fell down too, or let him pull her down to her knees. She had a flight in five hours and it was supposed to be the last time she kissed him, or so she'd decided. She didn't kiss him at all; she put her arms around him, felt his little start of surprise, and rested her head on his shoulder.
"Wish me luck," she said. "Don't fret or anything."
He laughed, low, into her hair: "What do you need luck for?"
"Dealing with you," she said, and held onto him tight. But he didn't succeed in making her late.