Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [295]
‘She had … I thought she had all the virtues: grace and compassion, and laughter, and wisdom. Any lessons I learned to do with justice, with honour, with integrity are lessons I learned at her knee. A child, as you know, makes no allowances.’
Philippa said, ‘Another man might have repudiated all she had taught him.’
He was silent. Then he said, ‘She thinks, I believe, that I have. She accused me once of excusing myself any vice on the strength of my … resentment. I think once you thought the same. I suppose you are both right,’ he ended.
‘Do you? I think it would be truer to say,’ Philippa said, ‘that both of us at the time had our reasons for hurting you.’
That had been in the first weeks, and her eyes had held unshed tears, her chest ached with the pain of it. But then, the smallest, the most routine human contact had still been beyond her.
From the beginning, intuition had told him not to touch her, and intuition had kept him from speech which would define, like a cobweb in dew, the invisible thing that had happened. His love showed itself as the air does, by its infinite space and the life-giving properties of its presence. ‘I love you in every way known to man,’ he had said that night in the Hôtel d’Hercule, and in every way barring one, he had shown her the truth of it. But he had never spoken of love again. For in one night she had learned the nature of man’s love for woman, and all poetry and all music had been wrenched from her.
He understood. She thought that he had hopes of a healing of the spirit as time went on, although he never spoke of it. Once, riding with him by the river bank she had heard the voice of a solitary fisherman, uplifted in a song they both knew:
Ta femme sera de la sorte
Dans les pavois de ta maison
Comme est une vigne qui porte
Force bons fruicts en la saison.
Et tes fils autour de ta table
Arrangé, beaux et verdissants,
Comme la jeunesse agréable
D’un plant d’oliviers fleurissans.
Then the tears had come, despite herself, and she had said, ‘What can I do? Your line will cease.’
And he had turned on her his clear, open gaze and had said simply, ‘Then it will cease.’
And again, his calm acceptance of the situation was not assumed. For him, it was now of no importance, as his place in the world was of no consequence. He was home, after long and harsh buffeting. And it was she, who knew his quality as Grey had done, who had to live with the knowledge that there was no channel by which it could continue; that for the purposes of the present world the flourish, so brief, was now over with.
He was home, one would say. But all that troubled her came to him, echoing and re-echoing between them. She knew every shade of his voice; every change in his breathing and hence, inescapably, when he was hurt, and the reason. Lacking the crude sturdy signposts of everyday, each had to find the other in a strange pathless glade of the mind, with dormant about them, instead of bough and creeper and trunk, the veils of a thousand threatening mischiefs to trap them.
And basic to them all, the reason why he lived, and had not made his own exit. The act by which, consciously or unconsciously, she had cried out to him: My love is as great as yours: now will you believe it? And then: remoter still in her consciousness: You do not need to believe it for look, I have joined you in your gutter.
Because of that, he would never leave her. She had meant to set him free and instead had bound him in chains.… But that, as well, was too trite an explanation for the thing that had happened. She had granted him moral sanction to bring his love into the sunlight and there, sudden, consuming and devastating to them both, had come this marriage, spirit to spirit, as positive, as devouring as the devotion sought by the monk at the altar rail.
But in the cloister, one does not live and speak daily with the being one worships. For her, with all her senses deadened and maimed, it might have been of little moment. But for her, instead, it was the single source of all misery, since