A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [108]
However, I had to admit that he had been right, yet again, back there in the compartment: Were I to lay down my academic career, even temporarily, in order to expiate my guilt and bolster his ego, it could well prove damaging to the strange creature that was our marriage. On the other hand, were I to lay the books aside out of my own free choice— well, that was another matter entirely.
I had known Holmes for a third of my life and had long since accustomed myself to the almost instantaneous workings of his mental processes, but even after two years of the intimacy of marriage, I was able to feel surprise at the unerring accuracy of his emotional judgement. Holmes the cold, the reasoner, Holmes the perfect thinking machine, was, in fact, as burningly passionate as any religious fanatic. He had never been a man to accept the right action for the wrong reason, not from me, at any rate: He demanded absolute unity in thought and deed.
Oh, damn the man, I grumbled. Why couldn't he just be manipulated by pretty words the way other husbands were?
* * *
The train slowed. I climbed down and walked back along the platform to help Holmes with the bags. We got the car running, I drove back to the cottage, and we went about our separate tasks, with barely a word exchanged— not in anger, but in emptiness. He went out late in the afternoon. After an hour or so, I laced on my boots against the wet grass and followed. I found him on the cliff overlooking the ocean, one leg dangling free, the smell of a particularly rancid brand of tobacco trailing downwind. We sat in silence for some time, then walked home.
That evening, he picked at his dinner, drank four glasses of wine, and ignored the accumulation of newspapers spilling from the table near the door. Later, he sat staring into the fire, sucking at an empty pipe. He had aged since that fragrant August afternoon so long ago, when we had drunk tea and honey wine and walked the Downs with a woman who would be dead in a few hours.
"Have we overlooked anything?" I had not meant to speak, but the words lay in the room now.
For a long moment, he did not respond; then he sighed and tapped his teeth with the stem of the pipe.
"We may have done. I don't know yet. I begin to doubt my own judgement. Not overlooking things used to be my métier," he said bitterly, "but then they do say it's notoriously difficult to see what one has overlooked until one trips over it."
Like a taut wire on a street corner, I thought, and thrust it away with words.
"She told me that afternoon that it was the most pleasurable day she could remember for a long time, coming here. At least we gave her that." I shut my eyes, encouraging the brandy to relax my shoulder and my tongue, to push back the silence with a tumbling stream of reminiscence. "I wonder if she knew it was coming. Not that she seemed apprehensive, but she mentioned the past several times, and I shouldn't have thought that like her. She used to come here as a child, she told me. She was also fond of you. Perhaps fond is not the right word," I said, though when I looked, he didn't seem to be listening. "Impressed, perhaps. Respectful. She was intrigued by you. What was it she said? 'One of the three sensible men I've ever met,' I think it was, grouping you with a French winemaker and a polygamous sheikh." I smiled to myself at the memory.
"I'll never forget meeting her at her tell outside Jericho, coming up over the edge and there's this little white-haired English woman glaring up at us from the bottom of the trench, as if we had come to steal her potsherds. And that house of hers, that incredible hotchpotch of stone and baked-earth bricks and flattened petrol drums, and inside a cross between a Bedouin tent and an English cottage, with great heaps of things in the process of being classified and sketched and a silver