Twenty-five

The smell of the pork and bean stew hit me as I reached the back door. Elspeth was humming to herself as she chopped something green and leafy on the large central workspace.

“Jude, sweetheart. Come in, come in. I’ve made some bean crock, and there’s plenty to go around. Is Cas with you?”

“He’s in the stables; he’ll be here in a minute.” I told her I was going to wash up and slipped from the kitchen towards the downstairs cloakroom to wash my hands.

Gideon was coming down the grand staircase as I passed.

“Young master Alcott! How are you this fine day?”

I glanced up, trying to gauge his mood by noting what he was wearing: a three-piece suit. “I’m good, thanks, you?”

“Marvellous, just marvellous. Are you looking for my nephew? I think he went riding this morning, but he should be back any minute now.” He came down the stairs and drew a look over me. “Did you two have fun last night?”

My cheeks grew warm. “Um, yeah, we watched a movie. Hung out.” I shrugged. Everything you think and feel is in your eyes, you know. I skirted my eyes away from his.

Gideon’s eyebrows rose. He seemed bubbly, almost and as eager as a child. “Oh, Cas said you watched the rugby.”

“We did, yeah, then a movie. I don’t think he was very into it. It was sort of on in the background.”

“While you talked?” he said. “You must have had a lot of catching up to do. Between you and me,” He leaned in. A vaguely sweet, boozy smell emanated from him, half-hidden beneath his cologne. “I think he missed you.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, though I was secretly delighted.

“And I know you missed him too, didn’t you?” At this, he tilted his head and gave me the sort of look you would give a baby.

“I—”

“What are you doing, uncle? Don’t you have some port to bathe in?” Caspien’s voice blew in like a chill wind.

We both turned to him.

“Darling nephew. You didn’t fall off your horse then?”

“Afraid not,” Caspien said. “I am going upstairs to shower and change. Bring the stew to the library, will you?” he said to me as he pushed past us and leapt up the stairs two at a time.

We both watched him go.

“Normally, he’s in a better mood after his ride,” Gideon mused after Caspien had disappeared down the upper-level corridor towards his bedroom. “Anyway, I have some work to do. You two have fun now.” He patted me good-naturedly on the back and floated off.

I wasn’t sure what ‘work’ Gideon did. There seemed to be a lot of signatures required on wads of paper being ferried in and out of Deveraux by courier. Hours spent on the phone with him talking animatedly in French or Italian. German sometimes, too. I assumed it had something to do with investments or shares but it was murky to me. A vague thing that never much interested me.

Elspeth had made up a tray, and I took the two bowls of stew, small bread rolls fresh from the oven which she’d smeared with jersey butter, and two glasses of squash into the library and waited for him to return. My appetite had returned as soon as I’d smelled the bean crock, and I was so ravenous that I picked up a roll and bit into it before Caspien arrived. I managed another five minutes before I picked up my spoon and began shovelling the soupy bean and pork stew into my mouth.

By the time Caspien arrived, showered and redressed in a pair of blue pyjama bottoms and a white long-sleeved T-shirt, I’d finished my bowl.

“It’ll be cold,” I said, indicating the bowl. “Do you want me to ask her to heat it back up?”

“It’s fine,” he said, sitting on the sofa next to me. He lifted the bread, tore off a piece and dipped it into the rich gravy. Rather than watch him eat – his mouth doing entirely innocent things forced more perverted notions into my head – I got up and perused the shelves. Before long, I found myself at the rows Gideon had told me belonged to his sister, Caspien’s mother. I wasn’t surprised to see clothbound copies of things like Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, and Rebecca. There were also a string of worn paperbacks with Mills Boon printed on the spine. The French Lieutenant’s Wife and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were by far the most well-read. They were both in multiple parts, yellowed pages flaking off the spine and the covers detached in loose sheafs.

“To think that all I know of her is her collection of tawdry romance novels,” he said in a tone I couldn’t place.

I gently slid the copy of Lady Chatterley back in and turned to him. “Gideon never talks about her?”

“Oh, incessantly. But I’d never believe anything he says about her.” He had finished eating and was lying out on the sofa with his head propped up against one end. “I rarely believe anything he says about anything.”

“What happened to her?” I ventured.

His eyes turned to me sharp and cold, and I immediately regretted it.

“Shall we trade?” he said icily. “How did your parents die?”

“Car accident. They were hit from behind by a truck.” There was nothing glamourous or mysterious about it. It happened every day all over the world. Seraphina Deveraux’s story, from what I’d gathered, was far more exotic. Something more like a story from one of those novels she’d loved so much.

“Did the person who killed them die too?” said Caspien.

I shook my head. “No. He went to prison for three years and got banned from driving for two.” He hadn’t been drunk or under the influence, just tired and overworked, apparently.

He stared at me. “Fucking tragic. The law in this country is a joke. Manslaughter is what it is, and he used a three-ton weapon to do it. Are you angry?” His own voice sizzled with anger, and I felt a weird sense of gratitude to him for it.

“Not really,” I replied. “Not anymore.”

I had been angry. For a few years after it happened, I was mainly sad, but then, when I turned fourteen, I couldn’t remember feeling anything but anger. I’d been old enough then to understand that someone’s carelessness had destroyed my entire world.

But one day, I woke up and realised I didn’t feel that same anger anymore. I could still find it inside if I looked, packed away under other memories and feelings I’d grown out of. Sometimes, I’d pull it out and shake it off, holding it against me to see if it still fit.

Cas was quiet for a long time. Then, he said, “She killed herself.”

There was absolutely no emotion in his voice. It wasn’t cold or anything like it, just entirely indifferent. I went toward him and sat on the opposite couch.

“You can wipe that look off your face, too,” he snapped. “I don’t want your pity, Judith. It’s no worse a tragedy than yours. In fact, it’s less so.”

He avoided my eyes, and I knew why. He was angry. I imagined having a parent kill themselves would be a far harder kind of anger to shelve away. To know that not even you, their own child, was enough to keep them tethered to life.

“Do you know why? I mean, was she sick or...”

“Gideon says she was depressed her entire life, that part of it was an affinity with melodrama and morbidity. They were both sad creatures by all accounts. I don’t know if it was that their parents – my grandparents – didn’t believe in mental illness or if it was that she never asked them for help. Sounds like her father doted on her most of her life.” His voice had turned languid with what sounded like longing. “When she got pregnant, it was a scandal apparently as he was some local boy ‘without money or good breeding’. When her parents found out they locked her up here, then forced her to birth me.”

I sat forward, horrified. “Gideon told you this?”

“This, I found out from her diary,” he said. “I’d never have believed it had he said it. I needed to read it with my own eyes. But yes, she rather hated me by the sounds of it; from the moment she was aware of my existence, she loathed me.” He looked straight at me. “She jumped from the cliffs at Sorel Point. ”

I was slack-jawed, unable to comprehend having to live knowing your mother hated you, and had killed herself. No wonder he hated the world.

I hadn’t a clue what I was supposed to say, so I sat silent and still for a long time. I wanted to refute it, tell him it couldn’t possibly be true. That there must be some other interpretation to be taken from a depressed woman’s diary that wasn’t this. Though there seemed to be no words I could summon that could go anywhere close to trying to comfort him, and though I’m certain he didn’t want it, I still tried.

“She was ill. I’m sure that’s not how she felt at all, not really.”

His eyes turned hard and cold as a frozen planet. “And you know the inner workings of my dead mother’s mind; how exactly?”

I looked away from him to my hands, then back up at him. “What about your father? Did she talk about him?”

“Daddy dearest. Ah yes, she talked about him at length. She loved him with as much ferocity as she hated me. I think she blamed me for his leaving her. Gideon says he doesn’t know who he is, but naturally, I think he’s lying. He’s always had a rather aberrant relationship with the truth.”

I remembered something then. The afternoon I’d come here after Caspien had blackmailed me to sit for him. Gideon had been acting strangely. Christ, every day you look more and more like him, he’d said, looking at Caspien. Had he meant Caspien’s father? A shiver trilled down my spine. He was lying.

Carefully, I said, “Would you want to know? If Gideon was lying and he did know? Would you want him to tell you?”

His gaze turned sharp, and I wondered if he suspected something. Though I didn’t know how he would. “No,” he said after a moment. “What would I do with that? What do I need with a father at this age? As a child with those kinds of inclinations, yes, perhaps it would have been novel, but now I have no need of him.”

And so, I said nothing about what Gideon had said that day. I shelved the words from that day like I had the anger over my parents’ deaths. If Caspien had no need of them, then neither did I.

Over the years, those words were forgotten, dust-covered and unused in the cellar of my memory. Until one day, over a decade later, when the truth of them would tumble out. Gargantuan and shocking as a dead whale beached on the shore.

Monday came with a weighty dread that filled my entire body. A heavy, solid thing that clung to my bones and threatened to pull me under. There was no good time to break up with Ellie, but the week after her grandfather’s funeral seemed particularly cruel. But then, so did what I was doing with Caspien behind her back.

I’d tossed and turned the entire night and managed to scrape three broken hours of sleep at most. On Sunday, I’d ignored her calls and lied about being at the cinema. I’d answered her texts with weird platonic words that I’d been sending to Caspien six months ago. Caspien, who I was instead sending texts that made me hot, fumbling, and aroused.

The entire world seemed to me then to be upside down.

There wasn’t much time to talk until lunch, but I got the sense that she could sense something was wrong between us.

“So, how did it all go?” I asked her the moment we sat down, alone away from the others. I’d given Alfie a look that he’d understood, and he’d moved off to sit with Georgia and Josh at a table a few rows down the dining hall.

“I mean fine, but it was just all so...sad.” I was sure she was about to cry again. “I went in to see him after, although Mum said I should only do that if I was sure because I’d never get the image out of my head. That it might be how I end up remembering him, and Christ, Jude, I just wish I hadn’t done it.” She shook her head as if clearing the image. “God, I’m sorry. I feel so selfish talking like this when he was like my grandparent who I saw twice a year, and you’ve lost like both your mum and your dad.”

I frowned at her, confused by this. “What’s that got to do with anything? You lost someone you loved. You’re allowed to be upset about it, El.”

She gave me a watery smile and nodded. “I missed you so much. Do you want to come over tonight? My parents are out.”

I stuffed a forkful of chips in my mouth and said around them, “Yeah. Okay.”

The weight lifted a little. I had a few hours reprieve.

Caspien called me the moment I got home.

“Gideon has gone to London for a few days. Do you want to come over?”

“Tonight?” I asked, stalling.

“No, next Tuesday. Of course, tonight.”

“I can’t,” I hesitated. “I’m going over to Ellie’s.”

There was a pause. “Wow, you’re really going for shagger of the year, aren’t you?”

My cheeks caught flame. “What?We haven’t shagged?”

“Hmmmm. As good as. At least, I’m sure that’s what Ellie would think if I told her.”

“Not this again.” I sighed. “You’re not going to tell her.”

“No, I’m not. I wouldn’t have told her before either, you know. I’m not that awful of a person.”

“That’s still under debate,” I said and he snorted.

“You like me now, let’s not lie. You especially like when I take you down my throat and choke on your dick.”

I groaned, rolling back onto the bed and grabbing said dick. I thought he might continue with this, but he didn’t. I opened my eyes and let out a deep breath.

“Look, if you must know, I’m going to break up with her tonight.” The words hung there in the air like an unwelcome stench.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why do you think?”

“How on earth should I know the interior design of your mind palace, Jude? It’s why I asked.”

I didn’t know what to say. What I should or shouldn’t tell him, what he would and wouldn’t want to hear. So I told him exactly what I told Luke.

“She cares about me too much. More than I care about her. I don’t think that’s how relationships should work.”

“Actually I’d say that’s how most relationships work,” he replied. “One person always cares far more than the other. I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong in acknowledging it.”

“And what about what we did on my couch, or in the birdwatcher hut, or the library? Is that wrong?”

“You know I don’t think it is.” His voice was sharp suddenly.

“I meant while I’m with Ellie,” I said. “That feels wrong. Especially when she’s telling me she loves me, and I feel guilty when I say it back.”

“Why do you feel guilty?”

“Because it’s a lie.”

A brief pause. “Christ, Jude. Do you think you have any idea what love is at your age?”

He was using the voice he used when he’d tell me how Russian Literature was greater than both English Literature and the ‘toilet paper’ that was American Literature. Imperious with a lacing of condescension. It was how I always heard him in my head, when I thought of our conversations in hindsight, when hours later I’d think of something smart to say to something he’d said or asked. It was as though we weren’t merely months apart in age and more like he were some wizened old sage with a wealth of experience beneath his cloak and beard.

“I think,” I said. “I think I know what it isn’t.”

Another pause. Then:

“I’m honestly not sure you do.”