the fifth novel au is technically fanfiction but has fallen so far from the tree that it is probably better read as original. four friends, 1970s–1990s, figuring some things out.
in-universe chronological order:
poma venusta (on ao3), 4k, valeria, isobel
avgolemono, 1.4k, rendell, isobel
arnolfini portrait, 2.9k, rendell, valeria
pax tibi, 1.5k, rendell, isobel
theophylline, 2.2k, rendell, isobel
revenant, 1.9k, rendell, valeria
mathis der maler, 1.2k, rendell, isobel, valeria
night conversation, 3.3k, rendell, crispin
hawthorn, 4.8k, crispin, isobel, rendell
durch einen spiegel, 2.1k, crispin, isobel, rendell
Hi from anon: I have more comments to come but I wanted to let you know I read the first part of the fic and I adore it. Thank you so much for posting it for me before the end of the year, what a special seasonal surprise. What a huge joy to see them all again, and to see them all at this point in their lives, the shifts and changes and things they've learned. Egg in a teacup! Isobel's recognition. Three years of luck. This made my week.
i am so glad it reached you in good time! as a slow writer long used to the sifting, echoing chaos of tumblr i was privately reconciled to the chances of your reading it (a) never, (b) ca. april 2029. thank you for having faith.
recognition for isobel was the first kernel for this (originally, long ago, a separate story about her coming back from this same journey). i don’t know how familiar you are with the canon, but over several rereads it struck me that she’s the only one of the four we see with a genuine, animating interest in legal theory and ethics for their own sake - c.f. valeria, who never whets an edge she does not intend to use. (no comparison with the men, who are neither of them duffers, or unsuccessful; but nor are they, without the gift of some unsubstantiated extrapolation, on either woman’s level.) she’s also the only one we see presenting and defending, quite readily, dryly, holding her own at conferences: at least when she hasn’t gratefully accepted a coffee and then gone back to sleep and slept right through them, probably a lifelong hazard. i have not made up my mind what she does in the long run, save that she does, largely, stay in london; but with her own capabilities, charms, social connections, and in some wide, odd circles the subtle, tilting weight of sibley’s favour (always; even after their death), she could hardly fail to make a name for herself.
thank you again for sticking around, and i will see you in the new year.
Il faro è la vita
il paradiso può attendere
(graffiti at the lighthouse of San Nicolò, Venice, dated 1985)
Whatever the dream, it’s better forgotten. He lies with his eyes open to the half-light, listening: rattle of rain on the skylight, creak and tick of the radiator, wash and fade of cars passing in the wet streets. A distant ambulance siren, the near bang of a gate. His heart is slowing again, after the jolt of waking. Whatever it was, it had ended in fear. He has the sense not to force the remembrance.
Always a mistake, to sleep in the day. Always a mistake to have got under the covers; no layer one can put on, after, will suffice. He sits up cautiously, chilled already, and just catches the book in its slippery gloss-paper jacket as it begins to slither off the bed.
More than a year after the whole of the house has come to belong to her and to Crispin, she still has not reordered the top floor: only carried out a little desultory moving by attrition, where when she wants something, a saucepan, a coat, a side-table, she walks up and gets it; and then, too, anything she has found inconvenient has been brought up here and left. He finds the effect unsettling, obscurely upsetting: and yet he is drawn up here, again and again. The smaller of the two bedrooms downstairs is his whenever he wants it – has been his, this last week – but almost every evening has found him up here in the room that had once been hers, reading.
15:39. He switches on the light beside the bed, so that the red letters of the alarm clock, inimical in the dimness, flatten and cede to the greater brightness. In the small bathroom he cups his hands and splashes his face, leans braced on his elbows and coughs to get it over with; tries to do it briskly; he has a dread of sounding elderly. Lord knows he has felt it, every spell of low pressure, since the river. At times now he is surprised by a photograph or a mirror showing the three of them together, where though he looks older than either his hair alone is untouched by silver – he almost wishes it would alter: people will take him for one of those intolerable old ponces who has it coloured.
He means, as ever, to begin to set things in order, walking back into the bedroom, but he is abruptly so tired as to preclude practical action. She never did put up curtains. The electric light has rendered all outside the windows invisible. He walks to the far window and feels the panel of the radiator irritably, to see if it’s on: the warmth is so little as to be hardly perceptible, like the goodwill of a ghost.
He turns at the creak from the hall: Isobel herself in the doorway, with a document box, bound in red patterned cloth, in her arms. There is no sensible reason that it should be such a relief to see her; but a candle-flame wavering passes over him, so that he has to put his hand to the radiator again.
“Oh, there you are,” she says, lightly enough. “I had begun to worry you’d gone out, and been caught in the deluge. Turning to snow later, I heard on the radio. I’m very glad you’re here and dry.”
Then, having glanced at his face, she pushes the box unwisely onto the already-heaped seat of a chair, and comes to put her arms round him.
Rain striking the skylight with redoubled vigour, and the soft brush of her dark hair against his cheek; the narrow planes of her back and shoulders under his hands, the wool of her dress shifting over the satin of its lining. Her own hands moving over his back, pressing and stroking, gently joining to a centre of warmth at the aching point mid-spine.
Silence all his senses, leave only the sixth to him, and he would still know when she was near: the stillness that comes over him, the peace. The same rich, haunting scent she has worn for as long as he can remember, warmed in the hollow of her throat like brandy warmed in the bell of a glass. The almost imperceptible sway and steadying, the anchor-line taking the shifts of heartbeat and breathing, easing and settling; though he almost always draws back after a moment he could stand like this for ever.
Like one of those exchanges made in a fable: the careless, comic awkwardness in all the rest of her physical life, and the absolute grace when her body moves against another. He would say still, with almost all the old censure, that she has often misspent it; but against the grain of his own nature, he has come to recognise that the desire that has drawn her to so many strangers has been the desire not to hoard a gift.
The shiver is so slight that he himself, lulled, hardly notices, but Isobel steps back at once to look at him again; and, her gaze changing, puts the back of her hand to his cheek, and to the side of his throat. The chill, faint as a call at a distance, passes over him again, but this time with only a little tensed effort he keeps his shoulders steady; he wants what he always wants, to see her face.
Nearly two weeks later, she is much better, though not, at close observation, recovered in full: still with those ink-wash stains under the eyes like a drawing in bistre, and that subdued, throat-clearing huskiness lingering in the voice. No longer obvious, perhaps, to a stranger, but it still catches at him to glance at her: the transient tautness easing again in the outline of her face, the cracks in the lips nearly healed – Crispin always finds some pretty, expensive little pot of salve or balm to give her when she’s been ill; it must touch him, too, to see.
She takes her hand away and closes her arms round him again, leaning her cheek on his shoulder; then lets him go.
“I have always loved the sound of the rain up here, but it does get chilly, doesn’t it. Come and help? You see I am taking your advice, to get ready so early.”
It is kindness, and exhaustion of the subject, that she does not press it. A little over a week later, he is beginning to be better, though his throat and chest are wretched with coughing, aching, abraded, strained; but that first raw pain in the throat has passed, and the thickly blocked nose that had made his own lips crack. They have been over and over it, nearing if never yet exceeding the limits of his patience; late the night before last he had finally said, as he had not meant to, “It’s the only way I don’t mind it”; and, having gone so far, hoped the remainder was plain: the only version in which he can have her as near as he likes, without worrying he will do her harm.
“Certainly,” he says, his own voice hoarse; it still hurts to speak. “With pleasure. But first … ”
All this time he has kept a fraction of his consciousness fixed upon it, and so he has heard it almost before it is audible: the document box, untenably tilted, beginning to shift from its precarious perch. There is time, and a long moment to spare, for Isobel to look at him in inquiry; and then, unable to resist the touch of theatre, he kneels before the chair and unfurls his hand in an elaborate gesture, and the box slides obligingly towards his palm.
Isobel, taken aback, laughs. “Thank you, my good magician. How was it that you did that? No, on the bed; there’s nowhere else.” He sets it down, and turns to come with her. “You know, Nathaniel always said you reminded him of a young Faust.”
“What!”
His turn to be startled into laughter: he has to stop and cough croakily into his elbow, smiling despite himself, before he can put his hand to the rail of the steep stairs.
“Well, after all. Theology. And pride. And a little too well-dressed: as though you must have had a demonic valet. And that terrible pitying way you used to have of finishing his sentences, if you thought he was taking too long about them. Most uncanny.”
“He might have known better than to suggest such a lecher,” he says, not otherwise troubling to hide the pleasure. Poor Nathaniel, and his galleries, and his homes all over Europe.
“Yes, well,” says Isobel dryly, on the stairs behind him, “he lives in hope.”
***
He would not call Sunday night early, when one is preparing for a party on the Friday, but it is four days earlier, to do them justice, than either Crispin or Isobel would have begun in years past.
It is, ostensibly, their Christmas party, but it is also implicit congratulations for Isobel: or he guesses that this is why Crispin, never before having shown the least interest in arranging an evening, is now taking such trouble. He has not observed many men to take it gracefully when their partners, male or female, outstrip them in recognition, but Crispin has been positively gleeful, can’t shut up about it, has probably been telling strangers in the street. He has the impression that Isobel is rather embarrassed by this, and would prefer an end to mentions: but he has the sense, as he has had in a few other matters, to let the two of them sort it out.
The work that remains is very light, as he supposes was intended: books to replace in the glass-fronted cases, bills and letters to gather and clip together. He does insist, aghast, on carrying up the suitcase she had taken, when incredulously he discovers it; he cannot fathom how she can have simply left it, in what must be an egregious internal jumble, lying about.
Four days before she had been meant to depart: his hall phone had rung as he had been on the point of leaving, that morning; and, hearing her draw breath before speaking, he had known who was ringing, and why. It had been Crispin, unusually, who had suggested she might dispense with accepting in person, and still more unusually himself who had leant the other way: gently, never once making an overt suggestion; but it was always, if she were hesitating, his opinion that decided, and all three of them knew it.
All the tricks he has learned in a decade; all the measures for averting the worst, easing the breathing, conserving the voice. For three days she had never put on a garment that had not been warmed. He had not been able to be as much with her as he might have wished, having had that week some professional engagements long in the making and not lightly to be cancelled; though it had hardly mattered, when she had spent so much of the time deeply, almost desperately asleep. How many times he had kept back the reproach, now when it was no use; how many times, by now, he has watched the same pattern play out.
Only the last night, that you might say they had really seen each other; all the times before that dreamlike encounters in the near-dark, the house always with a few lights on and, prodigally, the heating left high without ceasing, so that four in the midwinter evening had been hardly distinguishable from four in the morning. All the days remembered without date or division by either of them later; recalled only in a handful of images, sensory impressions, the deep blue gleam of dawn or evening tracing the knothole of a floorboard in the dark, the shimmer of steam over a cup caught in a side-light; the heat and herb scent of a bath tested with a dipped hand; a few low words, half-heard, in a familiar voice.
Crispin had come by that evening with her suitcase – “I expect you can get anything I forgot to put in, even if it is Siberia,” which was how he’d persisted in referring to Durham – and offered again, one time too many, to go with her; at which she had given a slight, bleak smile, and said with a rare note almost of bitterness, “It’s only two nights. I can’t go everywhere with a keeper.”
From Isobel that was cutting, as he almost never heard her; he had glanced at Crispin involuntarily, thinking to transmit some reassurance – she’s tired, that’s all – and found Crispin’s gaze, unexpectedly, held on his own face. For an instant he had tried to work out what was wanted; then abandoned the attempt, and done his best to indicate with a fractional gesture of the head and an affectionate look that everything was all right.
She had seemed so low when Crispin had gone that he had second-guessed whether after all she should travel on the morrow: a long closed-door silence that he thought must have been sleep. But an hour or so later he had heard her moving about lightly, briskly, and found the door open and all the lights on, and her rearranging the suitcase to her liking.
She had got dressed with a certain smartness for Crispin’s benefit, or perhaps, after days in pyjamas, only her own; and if she had slept in the dark plum-coloured blouse, the long checked skirt, she had slept in such stillness that they had remained for once unrumpled. From the doorway, in the moment before she saw him, he had seen her as a stranger might: composed, inward, intent, the details of form and feature almost irrelevant; as the judging committee might have envisioned her, having before them only her name, and her work.
Only two nights, not longer – indeed less – than he often went without seeing her; but the prospect of parting had moved him to foolishness. She had closed and latched the case, and come down for a last cup of something hot to drink. Like the old days, with her feet drawn up under her and the same sea-blue mohair blanket round her shoulders: the slender, absent girl for whom he had lived in terror. For years, at the beginning, he had wondered whether it would be better for them never again to see each other, if his company could only, by all he could not give her, do her harm.
She had begun to look through the records, a few eclecticisms though mostly classical, stacked haphazardly on the table; he had collected everything he had taken from Turners Hill with care in the spare room, weeks ago, and then moved it all out in haste to clear the space for her. He had taken only those he remembered as Anna’s, like the few books, and the riding-prizes. For all else in that house he had felt only exhaustion: but he had felt it incumbent upon him, as though this many years after there could be any use in the gesture, to keep these separate and safe.
It had still by Isobel’s usual standard been early in the evening, but late enough, that night, to show: the planes of her face a little sharpened, heightened, in the low light; and the cough, all that day hardly troubling her, closing in again with night. She had set down beside her, after some difficulty, the record she had been looking at, and turned away for what had seemed a long time with her face pressed against her arm: not, audibly, breathless or frightened, but all the same deep and painful, with all the intricately connected muscles hard-used and sore; he could hear, too, how tired she was.
Not then, nor ever, could he observe with more than surface composure anything that hurt her. But he had watched for what he had spent the last days watching, and seen again, even through all the loose layers, the depth of the breath she had taken sharply after: complete, unthinking, fretfully impatient, unafraid: without a trace of the constricting, coarse-grained wheeze she had had from the cigarettes, at times worse or better but never wholly leaving her, for the first nine years he had known her.
All the same, difficult enough. Her face, raised and turned back still distant, had been deeply flushed through the cheeks, and wet about the eyes and nose. He had glanced away, the courtesy he himself always wanted, to let her compose herself; and had heard, among assorted rummagings, a sudden check in the breathing and a muffled sneeze caught in the throat.
He had, still turned away, been on the point of remarking that they had an early start tomorrow, and ought both to be in bed; but then he had heard her drink off her cup and say, a little thickly but with the kind of determined redirection he has practised himself, “Do you know, my father wouldn’t have German composers in the house.”
He had glanced at her in surprise; though having come across her father unexpectedly once in an old Who’s Who, DSO 1946, it was not the surprise it might have been.
“Not only, you know, Wagner, but any. Or German authors. Even translated. Even Mann.”
He had said, lightly enough, “Whom one would think had earned an exemption. But I suppose he might have wanted his life after to have as little as possible in common with all it had held before. To draw a line.”
The same blue blanket round the same neat-boned shoulders, but greater than the casual beauty of girlhood, what she has come into now; even as she had been in that moment, with the grace of her features here and there a little sunken or swollen, and the fine veins in her eyes blurred and broken: even then, if she had smiled and looked up like that at a stranger, their heart would have caught.
“As though one can. I always thought it unfair to my mother, when she’d had to speak it at school – how they were forbidden to speak at all, those little girls, if caught speaking anything else … And her cousins, the ones who went to Lisbon, she must have written to them in German; they hadn’t any other language in common.” She had turned aside to cough again; but only briefly, and resumed, the lowered, altered voice soft. “Only later, I thought perhaps he had done it for her, meant it for her, and she had known.”
His gaze had followed her hand, raised with a wince to her throat for an instant and fallen again to her lap, where it had rested beside the other on the cover of the record that she had picked up and begun to study a second time.
He has always remembered Val’s early, vivid scorn for the idea of women’s intuition – “Only what happens when you raise one sex to speak and one to listen” – but how often, too, he has been struck by the careless alignments, coincidences, in Isobel’s choices and guesses; like opening the hand without looking and letting the diamond-tipped needle fall among the circles into at first a silence, and then a divination. The record she had withdrawn from the stack, no more worn about its cover or otherwise marked among the others, had been the one from which he could remember Anna singing, over and over; sometimes accompanying the forceful, lathe-turned voice of the recording, sometimes, slowly, on her own. In Grün will ich mich kleiden, in grüne Tränenweiden. In so many young girls’ voices there is a shadow; which must, in some, signify nothing.
A change in the silence: and he had looked up to find Isobel’s gaze on him with a charge almost of fear. She had said—
“Desmond, what is it? Have you heard from her at all? Do you know if she’s all right?”
The prospect of parting, and the desire to reassure; the always treacherous impulse to requite a confidence; that deep and perfect breath. He had said nothing, until then: but it must have been obvious, from the adjoining presence of the books and the ribbons, whose the music had been. He had reached out and taken the record from her like some token to grant a turn for speaking, and looked away; and, quiet in the quiet room, had told her what he still believes was not his to tell.
As though some charmed, translucent shell about him had broken, with his silence. In the morning he had woken and known, and felt at first only a resignation that was almost a lightness, moving through the practical matters, carrying the suitcase; pressing his chilled lips to the warmth of her cheek on the platform, free from all fear of doing her at least one harm. Only afterwards had the momentum deserted him, alone again in the house, which had seemed cold and disarrayed and, as it rarely felt to him, empty: until at last he had picked up the hall phone and dialled the familiar number without looking, to say that she was safely on the seven-twenty; and that, now that he had understood him, Crispin had been right.
***
When they have polished the long, scarred oval of the mahogany table Isobel puts the kettle on and presses his shoulders, with the gentleness that brooks no refusal, to make him sit. She puts an amber-crystallised spoonful of heather honey in her own tea, leaves his unaltered, as he has at last begun to request. The warmth is a pleasure on the fine-joined aches of his hands; he leans over the cup, too hot to drink yet, and lets the steam, soft as light, play over his nose and mouth.
They have both heard the swift step on the floor above, after the rattle and gurgle of the water draining from the bath: then the erratic creak of the stairs. He raises his face, sniffling, then his hand in greeting, as Crispin comes in.
“Oh, hello, you two. They haven’t got the good fizz in til Tuesday, but I made him promise to whisk it over jolly quick the very minute it’s delivered, even if there is a blizzard and he’s got to hire a yak. It was bucketing down out there. I had to swim back. But I got the things you wanted, or at least I hope I did.” This to himself, with a hand raised in return.
“An axe,” says Isobel. Sometimes he has come into the room when she’s been on the phone, and known by the light of mischief in her eye alone who was on the line. “A yak and an ice-axe, while you’re testing the typewriter. Hallo.”
“Yes! Or waxed skis. Or a tinder-box, in case he gets stranded. Spare axles. Or an extra yak.”
Crispin with his hair towel-tousled, all over cowlicks; Crispin in jeans and that ancient sweatshirt with the ribbing of the cuffs unravelling about his wrists; Crispin, smiling. After the last week even he looks a little worn about the eyes, though he moves as always with that gift-of-the-gods lightness that has got him, through the years, into so much trouble and joy. (Like the other half of the trade in the fable: in bed all elbows, and laughing apologies.) A compact with Isobel in secret: come January they will all three go away together somewhere warm, where Crispin is to do nothing, save what he likes.
Crispin goes to Isobel first, being nearer, and bends down to kiss her: both mouths still moving through the forms of amusement, her face lifted so that the long line of her throat shows above her collar, his hand moving in her hair. They’re a while about it; he glances away. Then he hears Crispin come to him, and looks up.
Always the catch and lift, the half smile drawn to the mouth, meeting his eye: like the opening of some piece of music – not, one would say, exactly stirring; more along the lines of the cat’s theme from Peter and the Wolf.
He’s not much for kissing at the best of times, and when ill can’t bear it: one of a number of preferences he is grateful, though he’s never said it, that Crispin discerned from a single instance. It makes it easy, now, to tip up his face – like Isobel, without rising – and let Crispin take it in the warmth of his hands: the strong thumbs pressing and smoothing over the cheekbones from either aching side of the bridge of the nose; the fingers coming to rest light as wings at the temples, where he can feel his own thin-veined pulse flitting, ticking, under the tips.
His eyes have closed with weariness, some pain, greater pleasure; even so he knows it is coming when after a pause Crispin, too, puts the back of one hand to his cheek, and leaves it there a long moment. For a second time, he sets his shoulders and begins a slow breath, and tries, though he feels he has lost the hard-won knack of patience, to be still.
Three years or nearly, of this long, coasting run of luck: as though traced with some invulnerable sigil through all the late nights, harsh winters, long journeys, crowded audience-halls – all the nearnesses to Isobel, flushed and sniffling; leaning in close over candlelit tables to hear her, touching her cheek, taking her home. To Crispin, that odd winter, for almost a week. Three years like when he was young, before anyone was careful, before anyone ever thought about it, ever noticed a pattern, hesitated to look in the glass. Three years after the seven since he had gone into that black water, at the place where he thought he had seen it moving, almost breathing, with the river. As though he had at last served out the spell after the breaking of his mirror, and was free.
As though anyone drawing breath is free: as though there is, ever, any going back. Nothing doing on a Sunday evening, either way. He opens his eyes and reaches up to take Crispin’s hand from his cheek and press it briefly, a little reassuringly harder than necessary, in his own.
“Thank you,” he says, before Crispin can speak. “I expect you did get everything. I hardly know what I wanted, as I said. I’m hoping it will come back to me when I have it all before me.”
Crispin presses his hand in return and lets it go, though the hold of the gaze and the set of the mouth are as plain as though he had spoken. But then he glances away, and says “What shall we do first? Invitations? Decorations? Or aren’t either of you at least a bit peckish? If I hadn’t had some biscuits when I got in I’d have fainted dead away. Don’t you want any, before I polish them off? A spot of toast? An egg in a teacup?”
An old joke, or now a joke, between them. Ten years ago: the night he had at last, though still earlier than advised, come home again, it had been Crispin who had brought him, and stayed over.
A mild spring evening, mild enough that he had seen that other houses in the street had their windows open, though after the uneven, dizzy heat of the bath he could not get warm again. He had lain back clean in his own clean bed, past minding, and let the chills wash over him without resistance, waves breaking on the shore.
The sheer astonishment of quiet, twilight, darkness, well-ordered possessions, faint familiar scents of polish, cedar, clear soap, wool: a ringing silence in all his senses after the fluorescent glare, the cacophony of voices, rattles and grunts of machinery, electronic alarms, the incessant press of strangers’ lives on all sides. As always, it had been his fate to be drawn out and spared, while others lay still mired and sinking. But even guilt, that night, had been washed from him: guilt, love, strength, memory; everything but relief. Thou shalt also forget misery, and remember it only as waters that are passed away.
The body more rawly marked, more pierced and bruised, by the help that had been given than through any original attempt to harm. The quiet so longed for that, having attained it, nothing could follow. He had wanted to say to Crispin: open the door to the garden and let the night wind in, with the scent of the rosemary that grows so slowly, and turn off every light but the small glass lamp, so that only the silent little moths break the stillness; and then leave me, go to Isobel, she ought not to be alone, and it is neither of you I want now: let me go.
Of course, that was more or less what he’d tried the first time round, and look where it had got him. Crispin had brought him water and steadied the glass, careful not to touch his hand, and then had asked what he could get him to eat; he had wanted nothing, but knew from bitter experience not to attempt the antibiotic without food. He had agreed automatically to the first suggestion, a soft-boiled egg: which Crispin had brought to him, immaculately unshelled, halved lengthwise, with a little jam-spoon, in one of his blue and white porcelain teacups.
Absurdity, sometimes, revives where even love cannot. He had reached out and taken it, lying back propped against the pillows, and looked up: Crispin staring back with an anxiety so intense it was almost belligerent. He had had to breathe carefully, with amusement and difficulty, when he said “Crispin? What is this?” A moment before, he had believed he had come to the end of desire; but he had found he was looking forward to the answer.
“It just seemed the right size,” Crispin had said, earnest to the point of mulishness, “and like you could hold it, you know, in one hand, and not spill it. And I thought you ought not to have to bother with a lot of little bits of shell.” And then, reverting to worry, “Is that all right, did you want it standing on end, I can do you another, there’s a dozen.”
He had not been careful enough, and Crispin had had to retrieve the teacup for a moment, but when he had caught his breath he had put out his hand again. “No. I want this one. A commendation for invention,” and, exhausted, his eyes closing with the last of a hard spell of shivering, had taken no particular care to keep their fingers from touching as he took it. He had known not to smile: had known how he looked. But he had forced himself to open his eyes, and look at Crispin again, and say quietly with what voice he had left, “Thank you.”
He had meant, more than could ever be decently told to another, what he had not said; but he had meant, too, what he had spoken.
If time has not been kind to his face, it has not been so cruel that his smile now can only discomfit. He gets to his feet cautiously, reaching out and steadying himself on Crispin’s arm, and says “No, thank you, not yet. Why don’t the two of you do the invitations, so that you can put them in the post first thing. And I’ll try to remember how to make the things I mentioned. Then supper. Isobel? How does that sound?”
“Eminently sensible,” says Isobel, coming over, hesitating, and stroking his cheek with the length of her hand; then pressing her face against his shoulder again, her arms closing round him, before she lets him go. “Only don’t eat all the biscuits” – this to Crispin, as she passes – “if you mean those beautiful ones Valeria sent. I’ve only had two, and I don’t think Rendell’s had any. If you put the kettle on again, I’ll go and find my address book.”
It’s previous anon, I’m thrilled that my message was a positive thing, and what a wildly generous dream come true to have a custom fic. I'm curious about the bad winters you mentioned Rendell has in the time after the worst is over, and how they're all getting on in the future. I love how you talk about beauty and aesthetics, culture and art, and how Rendell notices and appreciates those things. I hope that is both precise enough and open enough to be helpful. Thank you so, so much.
anon! OF COURSE it was positive. these are some of the nicest things anyone could conceivably say about my extended hurt/comfort idfic universe centred on my exasperating favourite from an obscure quartet of comedy-of-manners mysteries that i imprinted on at fourteen. truly everything, as the line goes, can be used in a lifetime. i cannot accept such kindness without joking a little to stave off the peril - looming conspicuously over me at all times - of becoming a self-serious sentimental bore: but all the joke is on myself, and all the gratitude for you.
you’ve landed uncannily on something i began to write once and stopped, and always meant to come back to.
to address some curiosity first. the future is kind - why not - to all of them; long lives and deeply, affectionately connected, though a lot of other interesting characters come and go through the years for all of them, some passing, some staying. they all get, essentially, what they want out of life: rendell stability and beauty, valeria challenge and mastery - she’s also the only one who wants a child, which she has, her private joke with sebastian is, nine months to the day after deciding to have one - isobel love above all, and all the pleasures of the mind and the body; crispin, frankly, fun. (crispin, among other things, becomes a hobbyist pilot, and loves it. rendell and isobel are aghast and nervous for years, but he has excellent reflexes and a natural intuition for it, and never comes to any grief, save one bad landing he never tells them about, which though very expensive doesn’t leave a scratch on him.)
they do get involved, all four, in one more mystery, which is a set of tasks that sibley bequeaths them - sibley gets a good long run, but was born, in my chronology, in 1917 - which take a long time to unravel, and which are ultimately about the restitution of a painting, though also about what sibley did after the war, and some things they left unfinished. i am realistically never going to write this because it would be nine hundred pages, i would have to research for a decade and learn several additional languages; suffice to say they solve it, or what can still be solved. this last mystery, also, takes place in a span where rendell is in unremarkable good health, though isobel is recovering from the only serious illness of her life - she’s mostly well again by the time events are set in motion, but it colours the ground of the story, so to speak, and does slightly alter how the four of them proceed in their investigation: which is one of those fractional changes of angle that turn and open, and by chance let in the final shaft of light.
so to come back to rendell. he is, as i’ve noted, in the long view very fortunate, and comes through the hazards of the fifth novel and the pneumonia that follows much better than he might. for all that it takes him years to recover, for all that he is never wholly the same again after, he has always been stronger than he looks, and for a long time afterwards - the whole of the time i’ve so far written - he gets over all his uniformly minor illnesses without incident, and does also, however slowly, continue getting better in himself. not without lapses, but in general he is careful, keeping warm, trying to build up his strength, and is in general rewarded for taking the trouble. by the time of the last story in the index, where he has isobel and crispin over - seven, almost eight years after the river - he hasn’t had so much as a sniffle for longer than he can offhand remember, and though it’s london in mid-december, he isn’t coughing at all.
it is luck, for all that it is also good judgement, self-discipline, precaution and strategy, and luck cannot last for ever. most of the rest of his life is spent in these spells of good fortune, where day to day he might be a little tired or shivery but is overall managing well. the majority of years go by without him ever having more than a touch of a fever or sore throat which, forestalled with warmth and rest, never worsens further, or a slight cold that’s hardly more than a change in the voice; in many years, nothing at all. but once or twice in a decade circumstances align against him: some combination of situational factors that uses up his reserves - for all his efforts always fairly shallow - some respiratory virus that he has unexpectedly badly, some complication or secondary infection, as difficult and longer, and the vulnerability afterwards of coming out of it exhausted with the winter not yet over. one year, which rattles everyone, he goes through all this twice.
none of it is the worst that could happen, and protectively, temperingly, he knows it. by this point he’s good about seeking medical treatment when needed, and near-perfectly compliant with it. he also, long before the first of these winters, knows he is loved, and has had, if at first perforce, a lot of practice at accepting help. he himself is aware he’s changed - him saying to crispin lightly, i know i was not easy. ‘is it morally justifiable for me to survive’ is never again the main tension for him: not that he never again has thoughts along these lines, but his pressing concerns are usually whatever the external situation was that had worn him out to begin with - especially if it’s still unresolved but he’s had to change his means or degree of involvement - and the prospect of causing additional worry or inconvenience to his friends.
each of them do, inevitably, worry, though they manifest it quite differently. crispin, a private but extravagant catastrophiser, is always like, i didn’t fix him enough and now he’s dying. (crispin, genuinely, on this axis suffers more than anybody - certainly more than rendell himself, who is sometimes acutely frustrated but almost never afraid. crispin does at some point confide in gabrielle, who offers him some not ungentle, level perspective; but he has always been driven by emotion before reason, and sometimes he glances at rendell, looking washed-out and ten years older, and is struck with a bolt of pure fear.) he never says anything directly, but he makes some bizarre, fantastical offers to buy rendell things - crispin has always had, indeed would have as a pauper, more money than sense, but through inheritance and some gambler’s-luck investments ends up with more than he knows what to do with - which rendell, baffled, finds partly touching, partly annoying, and generally declines, though i think eventually he lets crispin get him a token sixteenth-century venetian glass goblet or something.
valeria makes next to no acknowledgement of rendell’s equally minimal references to these reversals, usually only mentioned in apology for delays, in their correspondence. all the details, which she does not ask for, come to her through isobel, to whom she also makes very little specific reply. but sometimes a tone or a phrase in a letter will unsettle her, and she’ll go to the international-call hassle and expense of ringing him - ‘i’d like your advice on something’ - to hear his voice; and, hearing it, will sound in turn gentler than she meant. once in england again, where she feels she has an eye on him, her manner is strictly like, [thump on the back] you’re fine! teach my child italian if you’re bored. (one of these winters is the year when her daughter, clare, is eleven, going on an intense, awkward twelve, and rendell - joined sometimes by isobel - starts working through the divine comedy with her, the sustaining diversion of a long dark spring.)
isobel blames herself the first time round - just enough truth in this to pierce - and goes into one of her moral spirals about it, of which rendell knows nothing until a year later, when it causes a whole other story’s worth of trouble between them, though they do mend it (still another), and are better for it after. she has a particular knack for encouraging him in convalescence, viz. embroiling him in the sort of involved, slightly trying odd jobs she has always dragged him into. please help me turn the house upside-down to find this letter from my aunt. please help me convince this shop to let me return this jumper even though i have lost the receipt. (this proves, when the receipt is unearthed years later, long after they have successfully deployed their joint arts to persuade the shop assistant to accept it, to be because she bought it somewhere else.) please drive me an hour away to listen to this weird socialist lecture on more’s utopia and argue courteously about it the whole way home. and rendell, though sometimes still pretty shaky, always gets up, gets his coat on, and not without pleasure joins her; i’ve mentioned before that he finds familiarity immensely comforting, and ‘oh, isobel, what mad errand now?’ is one of the abiding constants of his life.
anyway, this winds round back at last to: in the summer of 2022 i wrote a couple of hundred words of the beginning of what i intended to be a long, complicated fic set in the first of those winters, about rendell, objects, memory, reference, material culture, if you will, and then for several reasons i stopped - in part because 2022 became very busy for me, but in part because the things i wanted to do with the story were tricky, ambitious or pretentious, and i was seized with a moment of, who do you think you are, why are you trying to achieve this in your mawkish sickfic of all places. i got the yips and quit. but i always meant to revisit it - thought a lot about it - never recommitted - and then! three years later a mysterious stranger turns up out of nowhere and requests, more or less, the same story. it’s like a chance in a fable, a gift in itself. i can only say i’ll do my best, and thank you again.
You're an exceptional writer and I really, really miss seeing your work here. No pressure, of course, especially given all you've already gifted us with, but if you feel like coming back someday, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be thrilled. I hope to see your fifth novel group, original characters, and others around again, and the landscape is lesser without them and your prose.
anon, this is so improbably and specifically kind that my first ignoble thought on reading was ‘good god, i can’t publish this - no one would believe it.’ you must be one of the anons from years ago, whose questions were such a pleasure to answer. may i write something for you? your message was such a generous surprise that i would like to return the gesture. any particular characters, elements, situations you would like? phrases, colours, weathers, times of day or year.
Their coat sleeve hanging empty on that side of a character with their arm in a sling; their companion helping to ease it up their good arm, then gently draping it over the affected shoulder, maybe fastening one button to help keep the coat in place but unable to fully do it up with the bulk of the confined arm across their chest, leaving the injured character exposed to the cold as well as vulnerably lopsided with arm strapped up and sleeve loosely flapping.
Feel free to ignore if this is odd/awkward, but I just wanted to say Long-Time Lurker, First-Time Commenter, etc, and having just read your updated About… I would LOVE to see you write about Henry James at some point. (Your prose hits me in a visceral and somehow familiar way, and I’m very curious about your thoughts on James now!)
hello!!! it could not have been more welcome. come and talk, about james or anything else.
so a couple of years ago i asked for hurt/comfort and sickfic requests for rarely-written book canons, and @silklined suggested ralph touchett from the portrait of a lady.
this friendly gauntlet knocked me flat. i haven’t read all of him but like most people who’ll give the time of day to james i admire the portrait of a lady, admire too much - i thought at first - to meddle. everything that happens is what must happen, including the ending, if you read it as i do that isabel returns only to keep her promise not to abandon pansy, and having reunited with her will remain in rome no longer than it takes to shove gilbert osmond down a flight of stairs. the slow, unevenly built structure of renunciation, love, reserve, desperation between ralph and isabel is the armature of the novel, deeply sunk, deeply felt; almost unbearable when it shows at last, exposed as bone. his death is the second great turn in her life, her true inheritance. everything that happens is what must happen to complete the portrait.
so. where do you get in, to an edifice like this? innumerable small doors; a few big ones. his youth, the early promise, the check, the resignation. the voyage to algiers, and after. my natural mode is always canon-compliance, ‘missing scenes’, and james, ideal for this, is not an author in the habit of securing his perimeters; the time in his novels rarely passes with precision and it presents almost no logistical challenge to interleave some additional fiction for any of his characters. one of the large unguarded doors is the three years preceding 1876, the only date ever given in the novel: the interval between ralph warning isabel not to marry osmond in florence - the first time she is compelled to recognise she will outlive him - and his returning to rome for the last time. we know he comes to see her in what must be 1874, perceives that his presence causes trouble between her and osmond, and withdraws; we know she has the child who dies. but we see none of this directly, only in timeskip, an elision almost of mercy. those are not good years for anyone.
something struck me, on the final arrival in rome - warburton saying:
He can’t keep warm, and the further south we come the more he feels the cold. He has got quite a good man, but I’m afraid he’s beyond human help. I wanted him to take with him some clever fellow–I mean some sharp young doctor; but he wouldn’t hear of it.
a ‘good man’ might be either a doctor or a valet, but with the context of the third sentence i thought it likelier that it was the latter; and then much later bantling makes reference to ‘touchett’s man’, who telegraphs him as to ralph’s condition. and this would logically seem to be the same man ralph’s mother mentions:
He has a man who's supposed to look after him, but the man's good for nothing; he's always looking out of the window—as if there were anything to see!
i was also struck by this, as ralph prepares to return to england:
“I suppose you know you can’t go alone?”
“I’ve no idea of doing that,” Ralph answered. “I shall have people with me.”
“What do you mean by ‘people’? Servants whom you pay?”
“Ah,” said Ralph jocosely, “after all, they’re human beings.”
you may remark that this is a low bar to clear: it is and yet i am certain that anyone reading this has not only general knowledge, but personal observation, of those in the twenty-first century who do not believe in the humanity of servants whom they pay.
so who is this human being? someone efficient enough to impress warburton; someone who stays with him to the end. (someone, i suspect, though this is pure conjecture, who receives one of ralph’s ‘small legacies’ that so puzzle his mother.) much of ralph’s life is - partly by choice - isolated and lonely, especially after the death of his father. he admits no one, james tells us, to his private apartments. but here might be someone he could talk to, as it were, backstage; someone who, despite all the constraints of class and custom, he does see as his fellow man. ralph has an aversion to what he sees as pity from women, or any involvement from doctors. but it seems possible that a man he has known for some time, travelled with, relied upon, could offer some help, conversation, quiet company, domestic comforts, physical gentleness. ralph is unusual enough, too - contrary enough, intelligent enough, odd enough, ‘so pleasant for all his queerness’ as goodwood finds him - to employ someone out of the common run, in one way or another. i also liked this centre for the fiction because in james the question is so often ‘do you love me or are you doing it for the money’, and the answer is almost as often ‘yes’. neither of them would ever be able to forget that one is a servant whom the other pays; but both, as immutably, are human beings.
anyway, then i wrote a little of it and i got attached, like why you don’t name the animals in wildlife rescue. and i started thinking, well. if you wanted him to live. how?
***
at this juncture we come to some of james’s peculiar - in the sense of individual, and in the sense of at an angle to the factual - ideas about illness. you might say a product of his time, and of earlier times than his own; but you also get the sense that, on principles familiar to any tumblr user, even if the whole of modern medical knowledge had been available to him he would have discarded much of it as inartistic. whatever happens to the body, for james, is an expression of fate; the mechanisms are almost irrelevant. and the fate is always an implacable extinguishing current: i can’t think of anybody in james who ever makes a full recovery - go out once without your coat and it’s curtains.
ralph comes closest, with his good winters and bad, and lives quite a long time for someone with active tuberculosis - not unrealistic for one given a good start and a soft landing, with no need ever to work for a living. he has the underlying physical strength to come back from a point close to death several times; he has essentially unlimited practical resources. what interests me is the swiftness of his resignation, his ambivalence about making the effort of survival (‘it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common’) even at the relatively early stage at which his father judges him capable of marriage and a close-to-normal life:
“You look at things in a way that would make everything wrong. […] It’s just the same with your bad lung. You're a great deal better than you used to be. All you want is to lead a natural life.”
which brings us back to james’s peculiar ideas. he has milly theale, for whom happiness is - briefly - ‘the specific’, who is ‘living by will’ until she discovers she has been deceived; and he has dencombe, who has a fatal relapse because he gets his feelings hurt. some of this is fantastical, some, i think, reflected in reality. briefly and bleakly: it only goes the one way. wanting to live has never kept anyone alive. but wanting to die can shorten a life that might otherwise have been much longer. i am not, to be clear, speaking of the inalienable right to die - the fixed date set for the sake of retaining capacity and dignity. i am speaking of the much murkier, much trickier form of passive suicidality that makes use of illness, should it come to hand, as a means - ‘if this finishes me off, so much the better’ - and all the thousand ways in which unhappiness works physiological harm.
cada loco con su tema, or: ring the bells that still can ring. i’d be embarrassed to show my hand if it wasn’t already on the table, but if you’ve been reading this tumblr for more than five minutes then you have seen it laid out plain. what i am always writing is the decision to live, despite everything; the decision one has to go on making, again and again, in the midst of what’s left.
there are harder sells for this trope than ralph touchett. there is so much in the text about how little he cares for himself - how after his father’s death he had thought he ‘should barely have patience to await his own turn’; even at the end he says to isabel, it was for you that i wanted to live. it is not his own life he regrets losing; it’s that he can no longer, as he says to warburton, defend her. i think his tragedy is that he gives himself up as lost long before his last chances pass, and by the time he realises how bad things are for isabel - who he assumes until too late is able to look after herself - he is truly near the end.
i set my divergence from canon at the parting in florence in 1873, and then spent a while playing solitaire, as it were, with the cast of characters, placing them this way and that, trying to find what victory might look like.
***
henrietta - nosy, loyal, splendid henrietta - is the catalyst. she finds out the secret of pansy’s parentage by chance acquaintance with someone who, like the countess gemini, was there at the time. she finds out moreover that osmond, while not having actually killed his first wife in the alps, had taken advantage of her isolation and illness to treat her with such cruelty as to cause her death - suggesting that she had proved such a disappointment to him that the kindest thing she could do was to die; delaying or refusing any treatment or anyone to see her under the guise of him knowing best. henrietta begins to tell isabel what she has learned and sees that at this stage - only recently married, newly pregnant - she will not hear it; tells ralph and asks him to stay in italy. he agrees, and on the pretext of trying a total change of climate, goes with his good man to live in the central apennines (as only the strongest admixture of love and fear could compel him to do; he finds it almost unbearably cold even in summer). he begins to find, though he almost cannot believe it, that the altitude does help. henrietta also writes to lord warburton, and tries to tell goodwood, off doing something manly in america, but the message goes astray. she then has an encounter with madame merle where, without meaning to, she shows her knowledge; merle tells osmond, who is then in such a state of paranoia as to wonder whether henrietta has also somehow told - ‘corrupted’, ‘ruined’, ‘interfered with’ - pansy, and wildly misinterprets various meaningless, diffident remarks of pansy’s as suggestive of her knowing too much. but he cannot be sure.
isabel, as yet unaware of all this and for reasons that are nobody’s fault, miscarries; and finds that osmond, previously all solicitousness, has little to say to her save to remark on his disappointment. but pansy is very much concerned about her, to the extent of some subtle subversion (in the spirit of the law if not the letter) of her father's wishes to try to see isabel, do what she can for her. ralph, meanwhile - still, at this stage, believing he will not live much longer - arranges a meeting with merle and offers her marriage in exchange for her total honesty to isabel; but she is too deeply false, too obsessively invested in her persona of irreproachability, to be able to bring herself to do it, even at the price of the ‘great marriage’ that she had thought her heart’s desire. seeing that the jig is up, she leaves for america without telling osmond why, which infuriates him further.
at this fairly fraught point, something happens with pansy that osmond interprets as catastrophic disobedience - could be almost anything but something like, she ends up by some innocent chain of misfortune stranded overnight as the chaste guest of a young man. osmond expects isabel to join him in acting as though pansy has betrayed him on a tragic-opera level, but isabel (who has reconciled with henrietta and now admits, privately, the scale of her error, but as in canon will not leave pansy behind) openly refuses to go along with this and does her best to reassure pansy she’s done nothing wrong. osmond, now feeling rejected all round by the women he has attempted to control, strikes me as being very plausibly one of those men who tries to kill his whole family ± himself because his vanity has suffered grave injury. i think he is, by nature, a poisoner in all he does.
he starts with pansy: easier. he picks a moment when isabel is out, on the assumption that he will deal with her later. but pansy, who is still after all about seventeen and has spent her whole life under his command, commits some tiny, loving deceit of her own - surreptitiously changing two portions of a delicacy so that he has the better, say, or pouring back into the decanter her untouched glass of some liqueur that she has always hated but which he thinks it would be picturesque for her to like - and the poison is set, by the hands of the fates, back before him. (that said: seventeen is very young but not a child, and i think it is also possible that she acts on a subconscious survival instinct, especially since her father, having shown her nothing but cold rage and scorn since her transgression, now proposes, out of nowhere, a conciliatory treat. on the other hand, isabel canonically notices that pansy lives in terror of unspecified punishment, so perhaps his conduct does not lie outside what he has brought her up to believe is normal.)
whatever substance he chose, he measures - whether or not he meant to - a mercifully efficient dose. isabel and, very fortunately, henrietta, return shortly after osmond has fallen to the floor, thrashed about a bit, and expired. henrietta has been a journalist too long not to suspect, especially where osmond has been involved, unnatural death; she directs isabel to take pansy into her own room but to eat and drink nothing in the house, and conducts a brisk, fearless search of osmond’s rooms, where there is quite conclusive proof of poison - he had certainly not expected anyone to see his own desk, say, before he had a chance to return to it.
god knows what they tell pansy. i think they do have to tell her, if not the details of her parentage, that her father ‘in madness’ meant to kill her - perhaps he said something otherwise inexplicable when he recognised the poison taking effect, or had prepared a bizarre, vindictive will that referred with certainty to her predeceasing him. but that comes later; at the time the only thought is to get everyone out as though the roof is collapsing, get away from where it has happened. isabel and pansy spend the night in a hotel in rome and then travel (with henrietta and warburton, the only one who has been where they’re going) to join ralph.
they are like two pulled out of a shipwreck; pansy especially in shock. they want quiet and obscurity, and ralph is very glad to provide it - he is living fairly simply for one of his wealth, having great interest in comfort (warmth!) and none in ostentation, but that is still at a standard where his household could absorb more than two additional people without a ripple. they’ve brought almost nothing; isabel’s maid follows on with a few clothes a little later. they each think it will be only for a little while, until they can get their bearings, and decide where to go.
they stay for three years. it is a way station, not for ever. but they are under few of the ordinary constraints of life, and they are or become very fond of each other. after all the trouble of working out the events that precede it, this interval, of course, is all i really want: isabel and ralph able to see each other face to face in the corinthians sense, to speak of anything, both brushed with a wingtip of death that drew near and turned away. isabel and pansy joined for life as survivors of the same broken spell. (i really, really love the ‘adoption of the enemy’s children’ turn in fiction, that ultimate defiance of bloodline; i’m still surprised and pleased by james having isabel say explicitly that pansy is hers, ‘has become mine’.)
but ralph and pansy, too, prove good for each other: a man who could not remind her less of her father; who never tries in any way to control her, but is always asking her what she thinks and what she wants, even when she would almost rather have it prescribed. a man who is not an unknowable centre of fear and authority but a person like oneself, companionable, conversational, occasionally cheerfully silly. i think pansy goes through a couple of months of reactive, profound adolescent weirdness soon after they arrive and it’s ralph who draws her out. we know how he dislikes pity, being thought of as a ‘poor creature’; we never canonically get to see him with anyone he himself feels compassion for, save isabel at the very end. but pansy is, as it were, a legitimate poor creature in his eyes - i think he also thinks she’s about thirteen or fourteen, since she’s so small and slight and sheltered, until she has a birthday and isabel startlingly says which one; even after that to him she is for a long time ‘the child’, though fortunately his manner with children is so unlike osmond’s that pansy herself never registers this. but this sense of protectiveness towards her also enables him to respond to and accept overt concern from her, which he would still have difficulty - though less than he once did - not turning aside from anyone else, even isabel.
ralph is never going to be well; still not going to make old bones. ‘better’, indeed ‘cured’ in this context, means no new lesions opening up in his lungs, and no spread of the disease to other parts of the body; arresting the progression still leaves irreparable damage, pain, permanent vulnerability. but it’s the difference between the ‘dozen winters’ he’s given from his late twenties, and about three dozen, in the end. it’s his man who notices first, then isabel, that he seems better: the night sweats tailing off, the fevers milder and rarer, the cough drier and less painful. ralph himself doesn’t really believe it - doesn’t let himself believe it - until perhaps the third year. he thinks he has lived long enough to offer safe harbour, and cannot ask for more. (as a side note, he is, though none of them understand this at the time, still infectious for some of the early period; but it doesn’t matter, since like most people in nineteenth-century europe everyone in his household had acquired latent, ‘dormant’ tuberculosis long before they ever met him. in later years, with a somewhat better medical understanding, he is struck with guilt and worries terribly about isabel, and pansy particularly, whenever either has the slightest cough; i think he assumes his man is sturdier and doesn’t fret much about him, though in fact he had a far longer and closer period of exposure. in any case, everyone else remains in that fortunate majority who never develop active infection.) i think isabel and pansy’s narrow escape changes his view of the world, knocks some self-pity out; he can see that he is loved and needed by both, and this carries him through a lot of setbacks, since any ordinary, ordinarily-trivial respiratory infection is still going to be very hard on him and have a long recovery.
their household moves a few times with the seasons, but remains quite high up and remote - this because none of them want contact with the anglophone expatriate community, though it’s also good for ralph in terms of avoiding the soot of urban centres. henrietta (intrepid as ever) visits a few times, is eventually satisfied enough with how they’re getting on to return to england with bantling. warburton, still carrying a torch for isabel but quiet about it, remains in italy for much of this time and comes often - ostensibly to see ralph, though he does also handle the sale of the palazzo roccanera for isabel, and the setting to rest of all osmond’s affairs, not only his will but tradesmen’s bills and so on. (i don’t know who osmond named as executor; possibly his sister, who doesn’t want the job.) i will permit caspar goodwood to catch up with his telegrams and hasten over to court isabel as long as he doesn’t get too much in the way. even mrs touchett comes up once to look them all over in her usual manner - ‘your servants are exceedingly familiar. oughtn’t that child to be wearing a hat’ - but after that i think she stays in florence as her primary residence, and never again suggests that ralph return to england.
***
i would make this portrait, in about 1877: isabel spare, serious, guarded before strangers, passionately protective; still not even thirty, sometimes lively as a young girl; more interested than any of them in the affairs of the world, ordering in books and newspapers. ralph at ease at last, gentle, fragile, steady; writing henrietta and warburton long teasing letters, kinder ones to others; keeping a succession of disreputable dogs that run round stealing people’s washing (and worse) and having to be apologised for, with considerable contributions to the local economy, by his man. pansy, scandalously freckly and two inches taller at twenty, lying on her elbows reading isabel’s novels; bold and paralysingly anxious by turns, always carrying ralph’s old penknife for comfort; speaking a rapid italian considerably more idiomatic than she got in the convent.
***
this period comes finally to a close because isabel, very conscious of the way osmond kept pansy shut away from the world, wants to travel with her around europe. pansy is uncertain about this idea; it’s ralph who convinces her. i think they go with goodwood, whom i like for his speech at the end of canon - ‘I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life—in going down into the streets if that will help her!’ - and who i think is that very rare man who could mean it about taking isabel on her own terms and not caring at all for ‘the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world’. perhaps isabel and goodwood eventually marry, with a careful, unusual contract; perhaps they don’t; they might have children together, might not. in any case she makes it very clear what ralph and pansy are to her and he has the sense to accept it. the travelling party might run into rosier, who hasn’t yet met pansy in this timeline, in paris, or not; he might be drawn to this version of pansy, much changed from the collectible ‘household angel’ he observes in canon, or not: she might take a liking to him or as easily might not. no one is in a hurry for her to marry; she has, by her own choice, no dowry.
ralph meanwhile extends his range cautiously nearer to sea-level throughout continental europe and manages it all right in small doses, though his breathing’s always better higher up and out of cities, and he doesn’t - not for a long while, perhaps not til the end - go back to england, though he misses it more and more as he gets older. (i think goodwood, ralph, isabel and pansy talk semi-seriously about all going to america and living in the adirondacks, but i also think it never happens, though goodwood buys up some land.) pansy greatly enjoys some things about city life but finds she also prefers it in small amounts; i like the idea that she goes on to do something with the ‘very careful’ drawing she did so much of when younger - perhaps becomes one of the early women botanists, who almost always had to pay their own way. but neither she nor isabel like to be too far from ralph, and there is not a year that passes in which one of them or both is not with him for at least a few months, wherever he is living; in good years, if it’s not too far, he comes to join them. eventually i think there are not even rumours about any of them - if isabel and goodwood have been together unmarried for twenty years, no one can find much to say about it by the twentieth. i think they all live well and unnoticed, as the line goes; i think, despite everything, they are happy.
***
at this point, having arranged the cards to my satisfaction, i looked up and realised that (a) this would take something like 200,000 words and eight years to write, (b) i had departed a little from the brief, by which poor silklined had probably intended, like, ralph gets a cold-with-foreshadowing in his last year at oxford and somebody’s nice to him about it. (that said, silk is a gentleman and a scholar and i suspect would graciously not even blink if handed ‘chapter xxviii: henrietta views the body’.) i am frankly unsure what to do about all this, save that at some point i would like to finish as a self-contained story the pre-divergence interval with ralph’s man, which is at least recognisable within canon and has a bit already written. having for the first time here noted down the outline for my mad au i still like it, would selfishly still enjoy working out the details of that first year they’re all together. maybe someday.
finally: thank you very much for this ask, the answer to which i imagine ran off like a terrible italian dog in many directions you were not expecting. i wish tumblr had easier anonymous communication features than the chanciness of the askbox, but you are welcome here any time.
I was thinking, as one does, about Valeria and Isobel. Both Rendell and Valeria seem to have a heightened awareness when it comes to Isobel, its source an attentiveness and attraction (admiration, care) that cannot be denied. I find Valeria's line about Isobel looking like a dryad very significant.
Isobel watching Rendell in turn, with worry and care, is beautifully illustrated in several scenes. But I would be very intrigued by what Isobel sees when she observes Valeria.
i liked this ask so much i didn’t want to give it back. thank you.
a literal reading first. we have textual evidence that isobel notices her physically, even remembering the precise shade she once coloured her hair after she has changed it. she finds her attractive, though not distractingly - isobel has a good-natured appreciation of women in general; she has that odd, wide streak of unworldliness in her, a generally friendly temperament, and the great luxury of beauty, the gaze without jealousy or threat. and, too, she looks at women without the excitement, challenge, disquiet of a sexual charge; for all that she canonically seems to enjoy and encourage their overtures - not a book goes by where she doesn’t get some girl’s hopes up - i get the impression that some tipsy kissing is about her limit. so although i think she does often notice when valeria is wearing something that suits her - a beautiful dress, a coat, a watch, a new cut and colouring to her hair - as often she does not: could tell you everything they talked about of an evening, but not how either of them looked. what she mostly perceives is the pleasure of the familiar, of recognition. she always knows whether valeria is in the room, is always glad she’s there, but the act of looking at her is more of a comfort than a sensual pleasure.
less tangibly, isobel sees valeria’s best traits first, with great affection. we have it straight from isobel herself, talking her up so fiercely that it’s assumed she’s defending a partner: ‘to know her and not admire her is a thing impossible.’ swiftness, bravery, wit, self-discipline, brio. they both clearly appreciate each other as an audience, for conversational flights of fancy and for letters - one of my favourite things about the books is all the correspondence, the differing registers, each to each. the isobel–valeria letters are the most mannered, the most composed, of any pair we see, in both directions (with the exception, which i enjoy for separate reasons, of isobel’s hasty small-hours note before leaving for jersey in which she assumes an extreme competence, amounting to omniscience, on valeria’s part: ‘and by “clear” she seems to mean “totally obscure”…’). c.f. isobel’s overt fretting about rendell in cannes, which obviously i also love. it’s not that they don’t worry; they betray more concern for each other than any other two characters onscreen - valeria casually scanning the newspapers for the italian crime wave, isobel needing a stiff gin before she can face one of valeria’s scary letters from greece - but they don’t admit to it in writing, or when the other is present.
what isobel sees, of course, is also what valeria wants her to see, and what she’s accustomed to seeing. at the beginning of canon, valeria asks in exasperation whether she is isobel’s keeper, and sibley says at once, sincerely, yes. valeria is splendidly competent, professionally and personally; isobel, for all the greek verbs and intelligence tests, is not. and this contrast must have been still more apparent at the time they met, enough to set their pattern; set it, for isobel, for a long while after. ‘she only has to sit back and look helpless,’ as crispin says, ‘and some misguided girl turns up and starts taking care of her.’ valeria is the first and best of those jolly attractive girls who ought to have better things to do than look after isobel. (valeria would be the first to say she does indeed, and i think probably shows a degree of salutary impatience with isobel, especially early on, that rendell and crispin never attain - ‘oh, for pity’s sake, you can’t be afraid of matches - sit down, try the wooden ones, they’re easier.’) i hadn’t realised til i started thinking about this how much marylou is a substitute for valeria, which i think everyone reading isobel’s correspondence sees at once and isobel herself never recognises.
what isobel sees when she looks at valeria is safety: ‘if she’s here, it’s all right’. she sees someone who is, for the duration of canon, willing to drop everything - even with a long-planned plane to catch in a matter of hours - to find her and help her and make sure she’s all right, drive her places, make calls, tell her she’s doing the right thing. i don’t think isobel usually sees or looks for any sign of hesitation, weariness, fear in her; she looks for reassurance and finds it, not unlike how she originally looks at rendell. even after the relationship with rendell changes, isobel still - in the most charmed, admiring, blind-spot way - takes valeria for granted, for much longer. it only changes when valeria comes back to settle in england after the years away, and they have to get used to each other in person again, after the better part of a decade of epistolary friendship. but by then isobel has got used, albeit with difficulty, to doing without her, and has come to appreciate her differently: finds her changed-and-unchanged, beautiful in the way that emerges when the casual beauty of eighteen or twenty passes from a face one has known a long time; and does notice, then, when she looks tired and fragile or her voice betrays some difficulty, though valeria herself never likes to let it show.
(the dryad line is the whole story. valeria would not, does not put it to herself like this, but she has driven out to grant herself permission to leave them: wants to see they’re each all right; sees that it’s not a separable question. i’ve mentioned elsewhere that valeria essentially refuses to worry about rendell, not noticing more than she can help - though she cannot help noticing - never being sentimental, never making a fuss of him, never even being overtly sympathetic. taking his hand in the restaurant is her one and only lapse after the river: the last for more than a decade. it is a gesture of courtesy in that it is the mode he, too, prefers; but it is also partly because she has had enough of feeling responsible for isobel, over the years, and has an awful, evasive sense of ‘not you, too’. she can glance at him, talk to him, easily enough, but it’s always isobel who holds her gaze, until she sees them both together and has to look away; looks away and can leave at last whatever jealousy she has had of what they are to each other. she is glad, to be sure, to see that they are better. but she is not going to be the dryad to anybody’s tree.)
Can't go past two of my favourite soft things - ✋and🧣 - for the prompts list. Possibly in combination with the 'sick on vacation' Sicktember prompt, though certainly not a necessity. Rendell or Crispin, perhaps, as recipient, if ideas fall that way?
a challenge and a good one; my thanks, long in coming. (thanks also to @silklined, who suggested ‘sick on vacation’ around the same time.)
fiction, 7.3k.
It was further than they had ever gone or were likely, now, to go again.
It was further than they had ever gone or were likely, now, to go again. Up past the heavy field gate that lurches down from its bracing and has to be shouldered up again onto the latch; past the sinuous fallen pine like a dragon on a Chinese vase; following for a while the new wires with the poles thickly treacled up and down in creosote. Then the turning away from where the worn arrow-badge shows that the footpath continues, and the faint track, human or animal, hardly perceptible, through the trees among which he, having only discovered this way yesterday, for a long moment is lost.
Then in recognition he calls “Careful when we come out; the edge isn’t far,” and Rendell, who like himself prefers warnings for heights, catches his eye in the shifting shadow. The veined stone and the turning as before towards the sound of the wind. And then the whip and wash of the wind itself and the wingspan in full of the open sea, too far below to make out individual waves, a stirring and sifting of infinite silver, brighter than land or sky.
They had gambled on the weather, reserving the week months ago, and been lucky. If it had been raining they would not have tried to last it out, whatever Rendell had said. All the same it’s been a cold summer, thin sun; half the blackberries still green here at the end of September, and the edge already whetting in the wind.
He raises his face to the turbulent sunlight, shading his eyes. Half of pleasure always knowing it’s passing, letting it pass. Tomorrow morning he’ll drive them back. He glances to Rendell with the anxiety of one who has attempted a gift and without being seen has his answer, turns away. A little later a gesture, the wind obviating conversation, and the shelter of the pines again.
“How did you know that was here?” Still low and rough enough to be hard to hear but with a happiness like a boy’s: brighter than he’s been all week.
“The sea?” he says, irresistibly. “Oh, I heard it was in the neighbourhood,” and then, relenting, touching the arm of a larch in the shadow, “Luck, pure luck. I was following the footpath, and then I saw this little wander. I expect you’re not meant to, as the drop’s so steep. But I think it’s better like that, you know – secret. I’m glad I could show you.”
That he had not meant to say. But Rendell smiles, always unexpected: still taken, tipsy almost, with the wind and the view; when they come out of the trees his face, inward, still altered. Worth it, worth all of it or nearly.
Out in the open the wind high above them too is fierce, clouds moving over the sun, and for an interval they are in dimness as though it has set. It is cold with the light withdrawn and though retracing is always quicker he begins to find it long; begins to think how long the climb must have been for Rendell who is now moving slower and slower, though he could not wish they hadn’t come.
He nips in to make a joke of raising the field gate, a door-holding flourish, so that he can be the one to heave it shut. An opening passage of brilliant sun, a square acre of spotlight; blazes of dwarf gorse along the steep sandy, rocky gulley of a path: the level road at last, as the shadow closes over again and deepens. At the stone path leading to their door there is the first pattering and scattering, half-heard, unseen, felt as a touch on the hand or the hair, of the rain.
“Oh, we were lucky.” The echo of the way Isobel says it, luxuriating. “All this time. Here – got mine ready.”
The lock sticks but he has practised it: like picking it, every time. The passage is dark and short and has that old-fashioned almost ecclesiastical smell of longstanding country buildings, dry oak, dust, horehound drops. Rendell stumbles as they come into the kitchen, knocks a scarf off the back of a chair and, steadied at the shoulder, flinches unmistakably.
They have never before travelled together. Sixth day of seven: whatever the intended change of relations, the separation has been marked. No use wondering, no ceasing to wonder, how it might otherwise have been.
The moment Rendell had opened his door, the first morning, he had thought Oh you poor devil – you fool. A flash fading, a heartbeat, and gone. A deer vanishing into some internal forest. Nothing the matter really, not to look at him. He had pulled the door to, closing them into the hallway shadow, and leant in to kiss him: chilly burnished cheek, starch and cedar – Rendell always smells like some frightfully expensive linen closet – and, stepping back sharpish, lifted the small suitcase one-handed.
“You see? On the dot. How you slander me. I can take this.” And the door opening to brightness, petrol, birdsong, the rising wind rinsing the night’s rain out of the trees.
Still an unease, though they had both made an effort, with the unsettled gallantry of a shipwreck or one of the other forms of blind date. Then after hardly an hour he had glanced across, stopping at a level crossing, to find him asleep; and struck by something in the closed face he had said aloud and softly “Oh, damn, damn, you silly thing, I was right.”
He had nearly called it off then, turned round: but to have chosen for him like that would have closed this chance and, he thought, all others. Nothing for it but to go on, as though under some compulsion in a dream, conscious all the while of taking him further from the centre of ready help. An echo, ringing and fading, of the long drive a year and a half ago, compelled the other way: a passage through the uncanny, none of them speaking, Rendell beside him remote and desperate, turned fixedly to the window; and for the whole journey at the edge of his eye Isobel’s narrow hand, thin-skinned as a child’s, closed hard about a fistful of Rendell’s coat.
But don’t think of it, look around you: beautiful, got the country nearly to yourself. Those flat-topped pines appearing as the coast grows nearer, sun, shadow, rain, masses of bright and dark cloud driven over the hills like the herds of the gods. The wet roads like seams of white gold, black lead, gold again. And him beside you safe enough and resting – familiar click and drag of his sleeping breathing – here in this suspension, this spell as yet unbroken; this moment while it lasts.
The trouble was, they’d set out earlyish and they’d made good time: when Rendell woke up and found they’d arrived he had too much rope for working off the embarrassment. First the insistence on a long walk along the shore, then without surcease dragging them down every street, striding about with almost officious energy, standing in the cold wet grass for ages rabbiting on about one of the churches: even stopping in at the pub on the north road and having quite an involved conversation with the man behind the bar about the cricket.
He had never seen Rendell drink a pint before; but he hadn’t done it as though he didn’t like it. He himself had kept quiet, watching – watching as though watching could touch the creased shadows under the eyes, the pale lips; watching also what he realised all at once was Rendell as he must be in his original village, one button unbuttoned, calibrated with deliberation nearer to the average. Even the voice a little different, without perceptible effort. He had looked away and listened, rather taken with the effect: a skill he has never had, never tried, in all his life. When he opens his yap, what falls out is what you get. And then, as suddenly, the other half of the realisation: this too one of the defences; one of the thousand.
Under their own roof again Rendell had been past trying to outpace it; had come out of the tiny shower room very flushed and already dressed for bed, and fallen dead asleep without any supper or so much as saying good night. Twenty past eight. He had fixed himself a cross and anxious stack of toast and sat up reading in the chill of the window-seat, unfairly, acutely missing Isobel.
A bad moment at dawn, waking with a start to find the bed empty. But then he’d come to his six or seven senses. When he had touched the feverish face in the dark, then put his arms round him, for a first wavering instant Rendell had leaned into it and the relief had been unspeakable: all right, all right, game’s up, come here, come in. But by the time the sun was up the withdrawal was absolute, Rendell silent, shivering, holding himself when he could with an animal stillness; by the time the sun had set again he had thought, we must go back tomorrow if he can, it isn’t decent to let this go on. But in the morning to both their surprise the fever had gone and he had put it hesitantly as a question.
“No. Thank you. Unless that would be your preference.”
Rendell, up a little too early: dressed and arranged with a punctiliousness beyond external explanation, waiting for the tea to go cold so the raw throat could bear it; looking into the cup with a bleak wariness which seemed, looking up, to include him.
“N—o. I only mean, don’t feel you’ve got to stick it out. Not for me. I wouldn’t, in your place.”
That, unexpectedly, had drawn almost a smile from him. “One can’t cancel – one’s whole life.”
Well: one can and when they rang me from—but don’t let’s. “No. But what a beastly bore to spend it doing things you don’t want.”
All that day and the next, no voice but a whisper; even in a whisper Rendell could be precise, cutting if he wanted but he had said then with no more than that same trace of amusement “Oh, yes. If only one knows what one wants. But if you recall, it was my idea to come.”
He had opened his yap and what fell out was “Oh! I thought it was Isobel’s.”
He hasn’t heard Rendell laugh since Val left, and strictly speaking he hadn’t heard it then either, but when Rendell had lowered his hand from his mouth after a painful derailment he had still been nearly smiling, and had said something, perhaps not intentionally only to himself, in French. And then, mildly enough, “Let’s – wait and see.”
After that it had been easier: not by much. All the things he’d grown used to doing for him elsewhere mysteriously impermissible here; no reading, no hot cloths – no bath to run – can’t so much as brush Rendell’s icy foot with his own in the bed or he pulls away.
It is a reversal he had not anticipated. Half the nights he’d stayed over that first spring they’d woken entangled, heaped like hounds: neatly kerned ribs, sharp joints, long-strung tendons, a few central bits and bobs irrelevant for the moment. He had begun waking, in his own bed, with a particular jolt: where’s he gone, why’s it so quiet? Once that stage was past and good riddance he had kept on trying his luck, not without successes, though the luckiest he’s attempted to get has been to put his arm round him and keep it there more than five minutes.
Feature by feature they’re nothing alike but sometimes Rendell puts him in mind of Gabrielle: the colouring, the face incontrovertibly plain and tired at one glance, witch-beautiful the next; his own desire, without correlation or prediction, that flickers, leaps, vanishes and reappears most as the desire to put his arm round them and keep it there for about fifty years.
He had thought this morning, we should have gone further away, out of the country; then he had thought, thank God we didn’t.
Not to understate the case: even here not without successes. He’d picked up a pack of cards at a petrol station the second day without much hope Rendell would take interest; it’s how they’ve spent every evening since. Even playing for real money, first what they’d had on hand, then fiddly pen-and-paper, a job Rendell got in short order: still surprising he’s been willing but with the cards had come also a medicinal bottle of brandy and that, he thinks, had tipped the balance.
Rendell, woken unwillingly and most ungratefully for supper, shaky and rumpled, nose and ears and cheeks hot and flushed again: when he’d finally got some brandy into him after it was like sobering up, the shirt-front smoothed, the hands steadied, the focus coming back into the eye. Halfway through that initial lesson he had glanced up as though seeing for the first time the tableau before him: the two tumblers of liquor, the spread cards, the cash; looked into his own face across the table and away, and said with an odd note in the whisper, My father should see this.
First time in all these years he’s heard one word of Rendell père: he’d bit his lip to keep his trap shut. Rendell fils had the worst repertoire he’s ever met – couldn’t even play cribbage – but he’s done his bit to improve it, indeed now owes some proofs of swift improvement, rather more than he had first encouragingly intended.
Can’t complain. Above all, through all, the relief Rendell’s turned the corner; he’d sat up a grim hour that first night with the map but so far, fingers crossed, let off lightly. Sea air, and the walks they’ve been taking: even with whatever he’s had he’s coughing less than in London. Sea air and the way he’s been sleeping – must be sixteen hours a day, at a depth beyond easy recall, nothing like his fidgety, friable usual: would be another worry if not so plainly helping. The shortfalls of the last week showing now in the hands, the bones of the wrists; all the same to glance at him surprisingly better – a good deal of the old set-stain colour washed at last from under the eyes, and the worst of the drawn look eased from the face.
He had come back yesterday after finding the lookout and called out twice, three times, to a silent house. First place you looked, so settle your ticker: Rendell curled on his side, still bundled in heavy socks and jumper from the morning’s brief excursion, on the resolutely still-made bed; reading lamp shining in the early twilight, book left open, shoes neatly moored between glimmers of floorboard.
He had paused at the door as a matter of reflex – anyone approaching, however quietly, would usually have woken him – and then as a matter of opportunity: Rendell, these days, always looking away. For a moment he had seen the grace, still arresting, in the hollow face set against the dark ground of the outstretched arm; had seen what Isobel saw.
How would he do it, he had thought, walking out alone in the early mist this morning – smoke of a driftwood fire on the wind, all the spiderwebs chandelier-strung – how would you do it if you wanted to keep him here? Not for ever; just a month or two longer. Or get him out of the country altogether, somewhere nice and warm and dry through the worst part of the year when the choice in London is rain or smog or both. Touch and go all last winter, that awful bronchial cough.
So how to convince him: the only, the impossible thing. Come with, call it a holiday? Not plausibly, not if it were months. The money wouldn’t be any trouble, hasn’t been for years; not since the packet kicked in and then he got into the game – don’t tell the Ghost of Rendell Père – got in quiet-like the year it got interesting.
Not to overstate the case; he’s still miles under Gabrielle’s minimum but, he writes to tease her, catching up. But she would decline if he were the Sultan of Brunei, comes the solemn answer; he takes risks she would never and she will not advise friends, it is her policy of thirty years, but she could ask one of her colleagues to lend him an hour – a man good with you young men, you know, you bull-fighters, who do not want to sit by the fire like me going knit, knit, knit. (Jolly tactful of her not to say, you jumped-up punters.) He knows a pose when he sees one and this is a pose par excellence; from everything he’s heard she did some pretty high-wire stuff in the seventies and is still zipping around going knit knit knit quicker than Rumpelstiltskin.
Oh, it doesn’t matter. Catch Rendell being kept like a fancy-woman in Spain or anywhere else: sooner die. No sultan’s fortune could solve the problem at hand, viz Rendell whisking back like a weevil in a walnut any time you look at him; Rendell who had in some ways been nearer years ago, more of a friend. Rendell looking ancient and miserable all summer and pretending to be out every time he was rung, or if he wasn’t pretending, where the hell was he? Rendell who might as well have got it if that’s the way he wants to go on. Rendell who could have said no last year, he had thought with a crack and a shock like stepping through ice, and been done with it.
He had stopped in his tracks, the wind an ache without ceasing on his face and ears, and looked round the shore rather wildly – nobody to keep his temper for – up into the white sky as though help or at least helpful cynosure were coming from that quarter. Accomplished in stage-vexation, he can hardly bear real anger: too close to the bone. For an instant he had blinked, seeing nothing, wind-blurred white.
But one isn’t sent away at seven for nothing, say what your soft-hearted types like Isobel will. Draw a breath and collect yourself; straighten your shoulders, stand at ease.
Say what they will, it does the job for life. Almost at once, steadied and detached, he had been able to look at himself with irony. What a terrific storm in a teacup, what a load of old aunts’ pother. Chin up. Pretend you’re in Jack London. Clear that raffle. Boil a seagull. Make Rendell drink the broth. He had glanced up to no one, smiling, very nearly at ease; only closing his eyes again after a moment, a touch ashamed as always after intensity, to keep off a minute longer the moment of return.
Oh, damn, damn, damn: if only Isobel were here. But that is why they have come.
***
The rain beginning in earnest: washing down the slates of the roof, clucking down the gutters like a flock of wet hens. The light in the kitchen is hung low enough that when he leans over the small table he can feel the warmth of the bulb on his cheek, like the angel on the shoulder, or the devil: depends which side of the table you’re on. He sets Rendell’s mug down, turns back for his own. Only you don’t think of angels as terribly warm, do you: the colder, the purer the higher you go; he imagines them with ice on their wings, well-known aviation hazard.
He turns to the table again, ready to pull out the other chair with a clatter and start things over: I say, are angels hot or cold? Sometimes, with Rendell as with Isobel, the odder the question the more considered the answer, where they won’t grant you a glance if you try them on the weather. But he stops with the experimental smile half called to his lips. Rendell has closed his eyes, leaning on his elbows at the table, hands spread above and about the mug to enclose without touching, as though caging a bird, or an extra-small angel; his wind-flushed face bent down, breathing in the steam. At least he’s on hot drinks again: freeze to death, else.
Trouble with keeping a shipshape kitchen: no excuses to linger. Between the two of them you would be hard put to find anything for amending; even the tea towel over the bar of the oven door folded as respectfully level as an out-of-action flag. He checks with a glance, reaches out and checks with his fingers, that the flame is out and the gas shut off. His own tea still too hot to drink. Behind him Rendell has been making various uneven, thawing adjustments to his breathing, ending in a sharp, short sigh; but when he turns around he is as he was, remote, set, still.
The anger of the morning has gone. He looks for it cautiously, then looks the memory full in the face: nothing, not for love or money. He’s aware it’s a fault in him, not to hold grudges: disappoints people later when they dredge up some manful apology and you say, oh, what, was that you? On the rare occasion he hasn’t forgiven, he says it anyway, just to get their goat. But most of the time, as now, he can’t help it.
He puts the back of two fingers to the heat of his mug on the counter, pulls away at the edge of pain: can’t be rushed. Like one of those children’s games where to glance is to forfeit, he keeps his eyes down as he goes out of the room.
There is one means of heating in the house, or one functional: the same, the very twin of the squat small electric fire his own family had had in days of yore or Eden, when he was the littlest and last upstairs, the late surprise, the joker in the pack, and everybody was dashing and gallant and picked him up when they came home. Anyway lucky they’ve got it; there’s a woodstove but when he’d tried to get it going the second morning it wouldn’t, only flooded the whole place with dense smoke and made them both cough, Rendell for a lot longer.
He had apologised one time too many, and they had been on the point of snapping at each other: but at the last moment he had got hold of himself and went out without a word, and when he came back that evening they had been quite glad of each other’s company, almost better for it than they had been. God knows, you couldn’t do that with a woman.
The bedroom, like the kitchen, inland-facing: dark as twilight already. He could reach out and touch – if he knelt on the floor and wriggled – the heavy pine bough outside the single sash window, rain-washed and sunk nearer under its freight of water, half-seen, jewelled and shining in the dimness.
Since he can never notice one of the world’s tails but he tweaks it, he pushes the window up, gets down on his knees and thrusts his hand out into the night. At the length of his arm he gets a pinchful of wet needles, pulls down as on a lever, and lets go. There is an upwards rush and a gratifying pitter-patter, and then the slow, grating, blood-freezing squawk of a heron disturbed at roost.
“Oh, sorry!” he calls after it humbly, having retracted his arm to safety with the alacrity of some shrew-sized ancestral mammal on the wrong side of Monseigneur Pterodactyl. He gets up and shuts the window, grinning in the near-dark: consoled by absurdity as some are by prayer.
The thing is—He switches the reading light on and locates the electric fire, faithfully unplugged and coiled, set down in the corner. He sits spraddle-legged on the edge of the bed and sets it before him on the floor as though explaining himself to it. The thing is.
Omitting kindly from the record some first puppy fumblings, he’s been at this since sixteen: half his life. Only cads keep a tally, but it must be hundreds: mostly women, since all a woman has to do to delight him is turn up in a different dress from last time or the same one, and come with him for drinks, dinner, dancing, afters, all the well-worn, well-loved patterns; but every once in an odd, slanting moment – even now though almost never, now, more than the moment, the charge sparking and passing – catching a man’s eye, catching and tugging, testing the tension on the line, seeing where they end up.
Some longstanding arrangements, some brief in the extreme. But in every case the principle the same: they’re there for a good time, which mostly means one thing – not always; he’d rather do the crossword with Isobel, with or without the other hand on one of her softer places, than hop straight into bed with anybody else. (Though this, admit it, is a bit disingenuous, as Isobel can demolish the most fiendish crossword in four minutes flat and always accepts a kiss to the victor.) Whatever the variant, the rule is inviolate: if they’re not both enjoying it then he makes his farewells like a gentleman, if a woman sees them home, and that’s that. He is unequipped for the pursuit of someone so rarely having, by his lights, a good time.
As he had understood it, they had come for more or less one purpose: which had been, as it were, rained off. A pity; not a catastrophe. It’s the rest of it he doesn’t understand. Not when from the day they’d met the gaze had caught; caught, pulled, tested, dropped, risen, held, drawn to breaking, closed and gone, returning, landing light as the finch on the branch, pulling away and coming again, all the time. This undercurrent flitting and weaving, doubling back and coiling, always underlying, for years of his life: both their lives. The early disastrous, greedy exultation after laughter; the retraction, the agreement to forget. Still the current always fluctuating in proportion of caution to provocation, the distance and its closure, pulling away and coming again. Five, six, seven days a week. All the time. Eight years. That’s the thing.
He gets abruptly to his feet and picks up the electric fire with an abstracted expression: not certain he has furnished it with a satisfactory explanation. As though awaiting instruction he lingers and listens: wind in the trees, rain in gusts on the roof. From downstairs he has distantly perceived at intervals some inexplicable scraping noises. A heavy clank. Quite suddenly he hears Rendell start coughing with a surprised, impatient note to it, as though something’s gone the wrong way down the hatch. Then he smells something burning.
Live through one house-fire, you don’t hang around. He is down and round the stairs almost without touching the floor. The kitchen is cool, dim, empty, the kettle off the hob where he left it. All the noise is elsewhere. He jerks round, perceiving only as a dreamlike impediment that he is still carrying the heater, and hurries into the only other room.
The ceilings are cobwebbed, low, untouched by licking flame. A little smoke in the air, if you’re looking for it. The darkening sea and sky in the wide window. The sofa shoved far back. Last of all, absurdly, his panicky gaze seizes on Rendell: kneeling in his shirtsleeves by the woodstove, which is displaying a small lively fire through the glass like a television, finishing out the coughing, reassuringly crossly, with his face turned against his shoulder.
Rendell catches his breath and turns in his crouch. His sharp face is lit with triumph and what the sympathetic eye can recognise – like calling to like – as the flicker of mischief. It is an acutely familiar expression, the glint in the eye, his mouth composing itself. He looks plain and tired, pale, red-nosed, a smudge on one cheek; he looks like himself.
He meets his eye and feels a physical wrench: like something has caught his heart by the collar, like a dog.
He opens his mouth to say with dignity that he had checked and his baffle had been total: and then, everything in him still slewing round in rueful, foolish relief, he says, “You’re marvellous.”
As any fool could have told him, that’s the smile gone, Rendell having pulled at once that face he makes when he thinks there is a danger that somebody is going to like him: years and miles too late. “Anyone reasonably proficient might have done it.”
Now that he realises he’s carrying it, he sets the heater down, and drops to one knee beside Rendell on the hearth to admire the fire. “I take your point,” he says, warming his hands. “Like a pin-cushion. But you know, you’re the absolute limit, letting me lug this thing upstairs and down seventeen times a day when all along you’d … Oh,” he says, distracted, “you’ve grazed your hand.”
Rendell flicks his gaze down and reflexively puts his other hand, ash and all, over the drying trickle of blood at the knuckles. “It doesn’t matter.” Sometimes when he clears his throat it’s pure disapproval, a habit probably dating to the cradle. He sniffs and looks away; then says with surprise “So have you.”
He glances down at the caught place – the curiously pure aspect of skin pushed back, clean as a turned-down sheet; the blood coming up finely in its mysterious lattice – must have been when he sprang down the stairs, hadn’t even felt it yet. Reflexively he shields it with his other hand, begins to say oh, so I have. Then his mouth twitches. He watches Rendell, a beat later, place the gesture. One drop, sometimes, and she’ll keel over.
This time he does hear the soft, husky beginnings of the laugh, before Rendell turns his face against his shoulder again: both hands, both gaunt bare wrists, ash-smudged and soot-streaked, held out at an awkward don’t-smutch-anything angle. Only a second or two, this time, with the throat already coughed clear; brief enough that the amusement is still showing about his eyes when he turns back.
He has, in the interval, held out his grazed hand; Rendell, with a hesitation he thinks mostly ashes, takes it. Why not. He puts out his other hand, and Rendell fits his slightly bloodied hand into that. They rise to their feet with a partly or wholly coincidental grace and symmetry, as though long practised for some esoteric ceremony. I now pronounce us silly buggers, and we’ve got to be jolly nice to each other for ever and ever.
He means to let go once they are standing, but for an instant as he straightens he feels treacherously light – tired, Rendell’s been doing the sleeping for both of them, or just too long since lunch – and he sways, he would have thought imperceptibly, on his feet. But Rendell must have noticed, since his hands tighten, steadying, on his own; he can feel the inquiring gaze touch his own averted face.
It is such a small gesture, to take him as it does. Tired, or hungry, or twenty-five long years out of Eden, when all the steadiness after must be of your own making. He turns his face still further away. Then, on impulse, he sets it down; sets his cheek on Rendell’s shoulder without letting go the joined hands: not asking, not permitting, either of them to come nearer.
He listens to Rendell’s breathing catch and level, pause again and let briefly out, as he has heard him do for years in amusement, or exasperation, or relief. He himself is rinsed clean of intention: just stand like this for the next five minutes, fifty years.
Chilly in the draught of the window once you’re up here, though from the knees down baskingly warm. He is struck with a sudden useless tenderness towards Rendell’s younger selves: the thin, freckled child Desmond learning to lay a fire, a taller child learning, one can’t ask but he bears the imprint of some lesson, to turn aside familiarity, especial praise. The skittish, disdainful, quick-witted creature, the hot-and-cold angel, he had been when they met. It’s a good job he hadn’t, as Isobel had once told him he’d seriously considered, given himself at twenty-one into the Society of Saint Thingummy: just think, no one to tease him – no brandy; no women’s company; no china or vases or little silver jugs or all his other magpie treasures. No central heating, he thinks, feeling a suppressed shiver run through the bones of the distinctly unbolsterlike shoulder against which he is attempting to pillow his cheek. Poor old thing, you wouldn’t have liked it really. Well, they won’t get you now.
He gives a squeeze to both cold, sooty hands, minding the scraped one, and lets go. He steps back and looks into Rendell’s face, just to see it. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it never happens. What has happened is enough, if only it doesn’t stop.
For the fourth or fifth time that day he has the sense that Rendell is on the verge of speaking; he looks away, parts his chapped lips, touches his tongue to the lower, closes his mouth again: then he says abruptly “You know, I was looking at the map this morning. I do agree, better to go back along the coast tomorrow. But it occurred to me – we’re not that far away; we could go to Stelle for supper. Since we never managed it last year.”
He quashes an instant unfurling of old-auntish objections. They had always meant to go with Isobel. But he can feel that Rendell has turned back to look at him. Don’t you, either, stop.
“If you’re sure.”
“I don’t think,” says Rendell stiffly, “that I might generally be accused of being precipitate.”
He catches his eye, and Rendell breaks into his funny, lovely lopsided smile, acknowledging, wry, conspiratorial. How that had almost shocked him, first time he’d seen it. Like signalling to like, bright as a beacon. Couldn’t keep his own mouth from matching if he tried. How surprised he has been, this last year, to find the familiar severe face so expressive, delicately mobile; to see how much of the accustomed impassivity must have been an affectation, an effort he had lost the energy or the inclination to keep up. Or how perhaps he himself had seen, before, no more than he expected; in which case how much he must, for years, have missed.
Gesture by gesture they are not at all similar, but every so often this reminds him of Isobel, early on and even now: how you try again and again to recall them from whatever world their gaze strays into, trying your hardest and never rewarded with more than the glance over the shoulder, turned or turning away; you think at last with a bitter gentleness, if they want to go from you let them, and then you look up and they are beside you where you had never thought to find anyone, in the spiral shell’s last chamber, inside all of the defences; all of the thousand.
“I took the liberty of ringing,” says Rendell, still drily formal. “Table for eight o’clock, if you like.” Then, differently, looking away, “This week has hardly gone as intended. I—would like to feel that something might be salvaged.”
Later he will think with amusement, you sly fox. Later still he will see that it had also been the truth. For the moment, he is only moved.
“Well, no one’s ever claimed I wasn’t game save my uncle,” he says, and then, as Rendell’s face now says, insist on reminding me of the family resemblance and we’ll call the whole thing off, “and we can leave him off as an outlier. I’d be delighted. Do they still do that stew with the rabbit and the pine nuts. Or that pasta with the mushrooms and the whatsit. Or that cake! I barely got any last time, Val snaffled it.”
“I didn’t request a recitation of the menu,” says Rendell, a little distracted by the attempt to last out another shiver, his eyes narrowing; he gives it up, catches his breath and walks into the kitchen, calling back easily enough as he goes, “But I happen to know the head chef remains the same. I shouldn’t think the set has drastically changed.” Sound of the tap running, hollow steel-sink splashing; he glances down at his hands, the smears and smudges of which he has miraculously managed not to transfer to his shirt-front or some newly painted wall or vital document or anything else in the last two minutes.
Rendell, returning, pulls the dark-blue jumper back on in a hurry; how little time it takes for his face to look pinched, peaky, with cold. He goes to wash his own hands, drink his forgotten tea, put the kettle on again. Even allowing extra for the dark roads and the rain it’s a while before they’ll be leaving, and if he doesn’t have something else to eat before then – been a whole three hours since lunch – he’s going to faint dead away.
By the time he returns to the room Rendell has restored it to its former arrangement, with the hearth swept and the sofa pushed nearer to it, where he is sitting in the lamplight frowning at the remnants of the morning’s Telegraph; flushed, abstracted, the back of his left hand pressed to his lips as he does when writing. As well as the jumper he has got the moth-nibbled spare blanket, smelling powerfully and belatedly of naphthalene, round his shoulders, and his legs stretched out with his feet further under the stove than he might venture if those shoes were newer, perilously toasty.
Typical, you daft animal, he thinks, paused on the threshold in amusement, exasperation, relief: for once in your life warm enough, and now nothing will do you but to go haring off again. Rather dry bread and water for supper than drag him out in the cold black wet and the untried route on the unlit roads. Rather dry bread twice, twenty times over. But in the absence of any such useful system of exchanges all that’s left is to go on trying, pushing, making one’s luck.
When he sits down on the sofa, he doesn’t speak or disarrange the blanket, which, enclosing, lies between them; but he settles close and aligns his left leg along Rendell’s right, knee to knee, hip to hip. At once this line of warmth occupies the whole of his body’s attention: not pressingly – so to speak – but not casually, either. Can’t say it doesn’t matter. But can’t say it’s not enough.
He leans back, closes his eyes, rests his hands on his thighs and gives a quiet sigh of, mostly, pleasure: raindrops embossing the world at the window, the tick and wuther of the fire. The darkening evening full of wet feathers, wet needles, the sweeping rain striking the chaos of the face of the waters, the undilutable, unfathomable depths. Think of the sea as night falls and just to sit and hear the hum of the refrigerator in the next room is a good time, by anybody’s lights.
At the touch to his hand he opens his eyes with a start, as though he had been asleep; but it is only Rendell, without looking up from his reading, taking it in his own – Lord, he is warm; even in fever his hands are never so warm – to run his thumb over the back, set it down again. You couldn’t call it an old signal between them: but no more, by now, could you call it new. Sent, most often, the other direction; and most often, he would have said, not received, or turned away.
With anyone else he’d try harder to keep his eyes open, but Rendell, punctual to a fault, is possessed of an uncanny internal chronometry: ask him in the dead of night what time he makes it and he’s rarely out by more than five minutes; and he himself, doing well if he’s kept track of the day of the week, is glad enough when they are together to abdicate the responsibility. He rests his cheek against the sofa corner, a jolly sight plusher than Rendell’s shoulder, and shamelessly pinches ten inches of blanket.
Not asleep but nearly, drifted too far from the body to start or open his eyes, when Rendell touches the back of two fingers against his cheek, and after a moment traces them over his temple and, gentling, gathering, brushes back his hair; and as though it were longer strokes it as though to secure it behind his ear.
From far away, a few beats later, he places the gesture.
The pang that rings, waking, through him, as much apprehension as pleasure: muck this one up, my boy, and lose them both and for ever. He has never felt equipped to offer much more than a good time. But for a year and a half now he has put his all in, staked all he has; has been working with the greatest patience of his life, guessing, erring, trying again and again in the dark. A sharp, incredulous ache to think that after all this time it has been answered.
It is more than he can take in, almost more than he wants. If they were speaking he would end it; would find a saving, breaking laughter, look away. As it is he is grateful to turn his attention to his breathing, which it is a necessary distraction to keep slow and even. No way of knowing whether this has deceived Rendell; he is on the verge of deceiving himself, passing again into another world, when there comes another soft stroking through his hair.
It is such a pleasure he suspects he has dreamt it; he thinks with distant, drowsy amusement, it’s like some dream one has when things are going wrong; the kind of consoling, inadmissible fantasy you have when you’re fourteen and in some ruddy awful Corps tent out in the night in the rain. Come on, come to; you’re not fourteen and not in fact on the verge of embarrassment; it’s a dream in a different genre of danger, the kind of thing that reaches in and gets you through music if you’re not careful and you turn your face, always, away. There is a resinous crackle and fizz from the fire and though he had not meant to he stirs with a murmur, and Rendell, deceived after all, withdraws.
Oh, do come back: give me an anchor, don’t let me forget. Half or more of pleasure always letting it pass through your fingers, the best always coming when your hands are opened, and you turn with discipline away. He knows this, knows it was not imagined; thinks, you poor fool, take your marvel, your baffle, and be done: still cannot help waiting, listening with six or seven senses, as though to call back into existence by force of remembrance.
Come back and tell me while I’m gone and dreaming; come back and tell me while my hands are open, both our faces turned away. How rare the alignment when we might both believe it. Come back but not too quickly, when what I want is this, the moment before the moment begins to pass. He can hear the artifice leave his own breathing, tries to stay though every edge round him is fining and fading. This suspension, while it lasts.
in amongst so many coarse-grained bad dreams, one recent quiet, lovely scene:
late afternoon in winter, a town among high hills. the sky turning silver to blue, blue to dark with a bloom and mist like the skin of a plum, the fog coming down and the beginnings of snow. an unlit room with a view of the steep main streets, a few people out in coats and hats, seen through wavery glass from a height, not individually recognisable. lights growing more visible in the gathering dimness, coming up on the closing hour of evening but not yet.
strange to have a dream only of stillness, nothing, as such, happening: only looking through the gaze of someone lying in bed, a warm bed in a cold room, watching through the window the human and animal movements through the falling evening. not myself; not anyone from present fiction, or anyone from life. all i knew, inhabiting, was that it was someone deeply depleted, recovering from some long trial, illness or injury, wishing in theory to be well enough to be out in the world again but without the strength for impatience or even real desire. the smallness of the window, the chill of the room, the faint sounds of the rest of the house going about its purposes behind the closed door. the peace that rises and fills to the level, wells up like a spring, when some pain has passed. more like a memory than a dream or an imagining, though much in the pattern of things i imagine, but nowhere that i have ever been or tried to envision, and no one that i knew.
She had guessed wrong, at the step in the hall. Not Crispin, who whistles – couldn’t take him to sea – and clatters and patters and taps the wall to keep himself company; but someone quick and quiet, past the door before she had looked up. All evening, all morning, she had thought she might speak to him for a moment alone.
At the end of the hall the glimpse is of a stranger turning, a woman in a faded blue-and-rose dress, stepping through the last doorway without a sound. In the dew-drying cool of the morning all the doors of the house are propped open; she would have heard a car in the quiet, but not a bicycle, or footsteps in the grass. “Hallo,” she calls with a note of command, following through the door.
Of course it is only Isobel, looking up surprised in the unlit room with its strong smell of new paint: Isobel in yesterday’s jeans and an old white shirt, with an unravelling grey jumper tied round the shoulders. A fading flash in the mirror at the back of her eye, the flowering pattern of the half-seen skirt; almost she has it but Isobel says a touch uncertainly “Hello. You sound as though you wanted something,” and as always, once one has held her in the gaze for a moment no other image persists.
“I wasn’t sure I’d seen you,” she says, and then, lightly, “You’re up early.” Up an hour or more already, for the first sleepy huskiness to have cleared, like fog burning off, from her voice.
“Oh, astonishingly,” says Isobel readily, aligning to lightness, “it won’t be noon for a good three hours yet, but Crispin just kept bringing me cups of coffee til I yielded. That’s where all the mugs went. We made a solemn pact to get the second coat put on this morning.”
The first time she has seen the room: north-facing and rather dark, with the deep greenish blue of the walls. All the sunlight comes in slantwise, broken as seafoam; the whole space is washed through like the ocean, with waves and eddies of brushmarks in the first amateur coat of paint and the clear light rippling on the floorboards, advancing and retreating, casting up odd glowings and shadows. Even the steady draught through the open windows reminds her: fifteen miles from the sea.
She has had to concede it, though she has said nothing: against her every expectation the house begins to seem habitable. Almost exactly a year ago she had driven Isobel out for the first wondering look, in part because the nearest station was still far and the number for the village taxi, at each attempt, rang out; in part to satisfy her own curiosity; in part because she was already thinking about who, among those who owed her a good turn or two, would be best placed to handle the sale.
The trouble was, she had brought it up in the garden, a bad influence: scattered silks of poppies, high briars as round the classical castle, early-evening woodsmoke on the wind. With the moon rising gold over the yews she had had to discipline herself to put, as someone had to, the logical case: the taxes, the distance, the utter mullock, the drains and the wiring, the state of the roof and the floors; the frank fact that Isobel has never managed to handle even one set of electric bills at a time.
She had not put it like that. She had been, she thought, quite measured and gentle; but she had forgot how with Isobel opposition always decided and “Of course I’m not going to sell,” Isobel had said out of a marked silence, raising her face into its Spanish-galleon look, arresting and disastrous.
It will never be how she herself would have directed her forces – if that roof lasts ten more years she’s a Dutchman – but when she had walked up the drive in the twilight she had been struck by that sempiternal human satisfaction at lit windows, the sense on the threshold that the current of life had here resumed. In the kitchen last night she had observed, with irritation and relief, that the name on the electric bill was Crispin’s.
Isobel has been walking round touching her fingertips gingerly to the paint here and there, as though a day later it might have forgot to dry; but now she has come to stand with one hand resting on the mantelpiece, looking out over the room.
You could take it for the mystic’s middle distance, that gaze into another world, if you happened not to know that she was short-sighted, and had lost so many pairs of glasses that she had simply abandoned correction as a practice. A fine excuse for never learning to drive, if you had, as Isobel has had, always some muggins on hand to take the trouble.
Of course, as always, hold her in the gaze for a moment and one abandons correction as a practice. The line of the slender throat, clean as a tulip’s; the warm arch of the cheek, hardly touched by the dim room’s shadows. In this last spring and summer, whatever else has happened, she has lost the sallow, haggard look she had had so often, the past few years. Like seeing the colour come into an apple on the bough, after the shape and form have ceased to alter: when the completing sweetness rings out like a bell from the centre, the echo of the flower, and you see the consummation of the beauty, as even the atheist cannot help feeling was intended or meant. Mind you, anybody’d look better if they quit a pack-a-day habit: but even as she thinks this, to try out how she’d say it, her heart isn’t in it; though it isn’t far off – within whistling distance, like a setter.
In the shadowy sea-light the sleeves of Isobel’s shirt make a bright edge against the summer fawn-colour of her forearms and wrists; the old white canvas shoes, too, dusty as they are, make the narrow ankles very brown. That fine-grained skin, almost miraculous how it heals without marking: so many grazed knees, barked shins, nicked fingers, closed over without trace. In the winters, since the first winter after, you can’t see the white scar at all. But Isobel has always been like one of the chosen ones from the cruel old fairy stories, where when at last their hand or their head is cut off the curse is broken, and they spring forth in glory, made new. Like you ought to have known, from the first look at her, that no harm could truly come.
“Missed a bit,” she says, since she might as well do something useful with the glance away. “Here. I should start there, if I were you. Then it could get a second coat when you came back to it.”
“Oh, yes.” Isobel has knelt to inspect the place by the mantel where the brush had not followed with precision the arch of the moulding, and now looks round the room rather at random for other omissions: into the corners, at the original plaster of the ceiling, out the windows.
“I think that was the only one.” She has switched on the ceiling light. “Could I help?”
“No,” says Isobel, smiling up at her. Three pips on the whistle, soft mouth. “This is my white elephant. Green elephant. And I’ve got the Idle Prentice to help.” Her own joke, from when Rendell and Crispin had first shared the room: to Crispin, it had stuck. “Anyway, we’ve only got the two brushes. Go and keep Rendell company.”
***
She had almost, given this instruction, set straight out on a walk: it does him no good, she has thought more than once, to be watched as they watch him, as his cotton-wool handling of Isobel had done her no favours in years past. But she is not in the habit of diversion from her purpose, and all week she has been meaning to talk it over in person.
She had thought he would be in the garden, or perhaps gone out of the range of general disturbance back upstairs – she had woken for a moment at dawn and heard him, already a floor below: but as she comes to the drawn-to door along the other side the hall she hears, startled, the careful, hollow rattle of some bottle of pills.
In plimsolls one’s politesse is limited, but trying several floorboards in succession she extracts a sufficient creak for her purpose. “Hello,” she says to the glow of sunlight lining the door, softly enough to be left unanswered without discourtesy; but at once she hears Rendell say, sounding worse for the night but with a warmth in his voice, “Oh, Valeria, good morning. Come in.”
This room is awash in sun and dust; at first, blinking, she can see nothing. The three high windows admit three prisms of intense light shaped and spaced like carrels: two at a long leaved table, strewn with papers, all its leaves put in; one illuminating, irradiating with a blaze of quite arbitrary mythic significance, the empty, threadbare claw-footed chair she recognises from last night. Somewhere to her left she hears him snuffle through a blocked nose and cough to clear his throat, and say “Here.”
She walks round out of the light, still blinking. No difficulty advertising one’s presence on these floorboards; they creak and crack like breaking branches.
“This floor sounds like it’s coming to bits.”
“It does, rather.” There he is. “You may console yourself that if it gives way you should only fall about a foot.”
As usual, he ought to be saving his voice, and as usual shows no intention of it. “Unless there’s a smuggling-cellar full of picaresque bones and barrels,” she says, stepping carefully over. “Or an old dry well that goes down for miles.”
“I can always rely upon you to introduce some reassuring possibility.”
The flood of sun receding, the shores of the room come into view: the walls richly faded like buff-coloured paper, with their own bleached centres and deepened edges that it would be almost a shame to flatten by painting over, though here and there an oblong negative of what must have been the original soft brick-red persists. Tall bookshelves, two empty, two looking newly repopulated, all, patently, recently cleaned; this was the room, if memory serves, where she had once dragged her hand deliberately through a thick crackle of cobweb, to make Isobel flinch; make her come to her senses.
As his face comes into focus through the last colour-blind shimmer of shade after sun, long familiarity has already drawn its accustomed lines: she has grown used, too, to keeping her gaze unchanged as she adjusts from the expected, but this morning he looks only like himself, tired, plainly a little under the weather, companionable still. He is sitting at a small writing desk in the corner, a book open on the cluttered surface before him; he has turned in the chair to her, but not risen – sometimes the sign of a bad night, though true too that he has lost some of his old near-theatrical formality, this last year. The bottle on the desk is only aspirin. In the sleepy, dusty glasshouse heat of the room he is dressed strikingly warmly, the collar of the corduroy jacket put up, and an unfamiliar old marled cardigan buttoned below it, with the edge of a handkerchief showing at one of the heavy ribbed knit cuffs at his wrists.
She has been, the second time, a little too slow to look away. “Headache, that’s all,” he says quietly, closing the bottle into a drawer, and she makes a minimal sympathetic grimace, embarrassed for his embarrassment: as though he were one of those tormented Victorians for whom the only permissible recourse was prayer. Mind, go back the hundred years, and you didn’t have much else. Take the modern miracle and get on with it.
She turns away and examines the array of repurposed cardboard boxes, ancient Sellotape fragile as shellac, with the unmistakable, pointless grace of Rendell’s writing squandered on their flaps. History, Reference; the f in marker as perfect as a violin’s. She herself had had an incipient case of handwriting like that when she’d been about fourteen, and then she’d grown up and got into the hurry of adulthood and got over it. Fiction. Foreign. The optimistic miscalculation of a box marked Poetry: a single Wordsworth. Then one labelled Hare’s Eye, though all the books in it seem to be the oldest: nothing as new as, nothing remotely resembling, the garish pen-and-ink coloured covers she remembers from childhood.
She glances up to ask and the answer comes to her, catching his eye, as though he had spoken. “I see,” she says, amused. “In case any of them are fantastically valuable. Like Henry finding the First Folio.”
The smile in the thin face: as he might have looked at ten or eleven, reading it for the first time; as he might look at sixty. “Or Anne finding the sword in the rafters.”
“Yes! I loved that one. I always thought, I’d have kept it. Or Sid finding the Roman coins. Funny, looking back, how often Vimare repeated the conceit. I can’t say I noticed at the time.”
“No, nor I.” He turns away to cough once, and after a resigned, precarious instant, gestures to be let alone; she walks to a window. After less of an interval than she would have thought worth making the fuss over, she hears him catch his breath and say briskly “I don’t suppose any of them are really worth anything, or Nicholls would have taken them. But there’s a few eighteenth-century nobodies in immaculate first editions.”
“A bit sad, aren’t they? Look on my Works, with the pages uncut. Well, I wish you joy of them. But I’m going out to sit in the sun for a while. I don’t suppose I could tempt you to join me.”
“On the contrary,” he says with a sudden bitterness, “you forget what an adept in sloth I have become”: then, pressing his lips together, he glances back to her and says in an altogether different tone, the one they both take when wishing to embarrass neither by apology, “I would like that.”
She returns the mirror-flicker of the particular smile that means, Received and understood. She is rather relieved to observe him feeling sorry for himself. When she had looked back from the window he had had one hand braced against his chest, a gesture she has not seen in some while. But now she can place the unease: all last night he had been a little too even-tempered for her liking. It’s the ones who go all saintly that don’t make it, she had overheard her mother say once with bleak backstage flippancy: her mother who, invited to so many funerals, had had the discipline never to go.
***
Though the sun is now high the breeze has kept its freshness; in the shade her legs in shorts come pleasantly in and out of gooseflesh. Yesterday London had still been sodden with the late heat, and the grime, of urban summer: here the air is clear and cool and smells of old leaves and new leaves, damp grass and dry. The starlight through her window, last night, had been nearly bright enough to read by.
She drags two of the three iron chairs out into the sun. “Are there cushions for these?” and then, noticing, opening the battered weatherproof box, “Oh, yes. Good God, those must have been lurid in their day. Proper sixties.”
“I know. Like the fashions after the discovery of aniline dyes. These passionate cycles of the most – appalling taste.” His voice has faltered; he sneezes hoarsely with distinct exasperation, and resumes with almost pointed civility, as though reproaching a third party for interruption. “I do wonder who bought them. It doesn’t seem like what we know of Hermann. But the colours have become quite pleasant if you let your eyes go out of focus.”
“Like a joke about faint praise,” she says, pausing in tying the rust-stained strings to the second chair, and trying it. The bulbous shapes have diluted down to silver, olive, mauve, lavender, a palette soft as sage in flower. Change everything else, change their essential natures, and they might be beautiful. As with many of us. “They only needed thirty years in a cask, like a brandy.”
He stretches out on the first of the chairs with a cautious stiffness she observes with the incomprehension, compassionate and total, of one in the best physical shape of their life. Then she carries the small sun-bleached wooden table out to stand between them and lies back in her own chair. After a moment he closes his eyes, and she looks him over with the narrow, evaluative satisfaction of a text she has edited.
He looks younger now, in the glance at the corner of the eye, than he had in the spring – younger than he has for years; the frayed country clothes, and the careless fall of his hair across his brow, when her default image of him for a long time had been fastidiously City, combed as a preened wing. Only when the gaze comes nearer does it show that his face has lost that irreparable smoothness still unbroken in her own; but the white, wasted string-and-bone look has almost gone from his wrists and throat, and his face and arms are densely, resplendently freckled, more than in all the years she has known him.
That is her work: every day she could spare, while the weather and the luck held; the cost would have appalled her had she stopped to think of it but she had set her shoulders and recused herself from thought. Only the first time she had not been able to keep herself from thinking, all that for half an hour on the water, with those livid hollows under his eyes; then four hours out in the courtyard of the Eight Bells, masts clinking in the harbour, ice chiming in the glass. But that evening he had seemed so much better that there had been nothing for it but to try again, and again.
They had both thought he might get seasick – “I seem the type, don’t I,” he had remarked at the beginning, sceptical but willing – but he had proved to have what Crispin, who hasn’t, terms the gimbal in the gizzard. She had not been certain he could ever want to go out on deep water, either; even as they walked out at the marina she had not been certain but at the end of the pier the light had glittered brilliant all around them, scattering and rejoining, fluid and kaleidoscope-bright, and he had shaded his eyes and said what she had thought long ago, “It’s like another world.”
The wind, having come a long way, stirs the birches; though he has a blanket over his lap she sees a shiver run through him, and another, gathering, tensed into suppression. After a moment he sits up, pulls the jacket closer about his shoulders and turning toward her says abruptly “You know, about Galanis. What I don’t understand is, if he ever in fact intended re-election … ” This too as though some inconsiderate other had been preventing him, all this time; though like Isobel he has always had the merciless habit of assuming every conversation open to resumption days or weeks later, showing every pitying sign of surprise should their interlocutor require a reminder. As this continuation dates only from last night, she can manage, thank you. If he is posturing a little, she is pleased to see it.
They can just hear, through the open doors and windows, the other two voices – meaning, mostly, that they can hear Crispin, though every so often they hear Isobel’s laughter. A champion witterer, Crispin: put him on like a radio. It would drive her to distraction, but Isobel likes it and even Rendell, once when Crispin was away, came close to admitting he missed it.
Ask a man to be silent ten minutes, she has noticed, and most often he can’t hack it. Sebastian sings, endless and omnivorous: Magnificats, madrigals, Minogue. “Choral scholarship,” he says, ruefully. “Can’t take the pond out of the frog.” Now and again she would replace the frog: but he has a lovely voice, one of those coveted true tenors, and a remarkable, unconscious talent for the haunting, gentling rearrangement; more than once she has paused unseen to listen for pleasure and recognised one of the songs that would ordinarily lead her to change the station.
She glances up, having registered a silence. She has just time to see Rendell turn away with a distant, distracted look; after an instant he sneezes again, which briefly sets him coughing, and she looks away while he takes out the handkerchief and clears his nose and throat.
“Sorry.” He sounds husky and unhappy, and for a moment no older than when they’d met. “I can’t imagine how I’ve picked this up. I’ve done nothing this last week – gone nowhere, really – seen no one. It seems remarkably unfair.”
Well, you are always touching your eyes, she thinks with a pang half sympathy, half exasperation: a proscription she has obeyed from childhood. She could reproduce his gesture exactly: the index fingers tracing up either side of the thin-bridged nose, with its burnished, bony arch; the fingertips fitting magnetically, unluckily, into the irritated corners; then the hands folding in to press their knuckles hard along the fragile eyelids, the unevenly drawn breath, the sigh. At eighteen, she had thought it one of many affectations; but he has never changed it, nor altered with changes of company.
She doesn’t say it. She told him, anyway, when they were twenty: his lookout if he hasn’t listened. She says, mildly, “Hard luck. Are you coming in this week?”
“I thought I was, yes. Still hope to. I have a meeting on Wednesday I’d rather not miss.” He has lain back as when first settling; a little fretfully he touches the handkerchief to his mouth and coughs again, not opening his eyes. “Just have to see how it goes.” And then, quietly enough that she reads it on his lips more than hears him, “God, I’m tired.”
He never says it: never like that. She looks again, sharply, at his face. Nothing out of the ordinary. If he were any other she might press further; but she recalls, not for the first time, the edge in his voice when he had rung her in April.
“I can’t bear any more being fussed over. Let me take you out to supper.”
It had been a test of tact, and of nerve, to say nothing: he had looked wretched, shivering in the mild evening, in his new winter coat. Even at the table he had left it round his shoulders, not coughing much but hardly eating, either: alternating absent languor with fitful animation, flaring and fading, paper to ash. For one sick and hollow moment she had wondered whether he had been drinking: but controlling her face and reserving her verdict, watching, she had thought that if that was how he was managing the evening’s breathing, that was all that he was doing. He had left the better part of the wine in his single glass, to the best of her observation genuinely forgetting, and through all the changes he had been quite compos mentis, judgemental as ever, delicately catty; he had unexpectedly, painfully, made her laugh.
After little more than an hour he had been hoarse and heavy-eyed, and though he insisted that they should have coffee after, she thought there was a relief in his face when the plates had been taken, and the end was in sight. He had touched his cold hand to hers on the cloth of the table, and before she could stop herself she had run her thumb over the fine, sharp back of it. He had not drawn away.
“I’ve never thanked you properly. For anything.”
“Nothing to thank me for. Enlightened self-interest. I like having you around.” She had kept her voice very light, very dry. Liquor, or codeine, or whatever means he had chosen: not her way, to take advantage, nor her right. “I have never thanked you either. For the introduction to Basil, or for anything else. I should say there’s no need.”
The gentleness in his answering smile had sent a chill through her: like a farewell. But she had seen him home without betraying her fear, and the next week steeled herself and rung to ask whether he would like to go for a walk round the gardens at Chiswick; and he had sounded, accepting, better than he had in years.
Siskins shrilling and chiming, courting or fighting, flickering from birch to birch. You would think their trials would be over, this late in the year. After a while, she glances over again at his face in profile, and thinks he might be asleep.
Strange that it should have been not him but Isobel she had first thought of, when Thacknell had made her the offer: Isobel she had hesitated to think of leaving, as it were, on her own. On Tuesday it will have been the week she was advised to take to think it over. Sebastian, so far, is the only one she has told.
He had not liked the idea. She had seen him thinking, If you were my wife, I could … “Forgive me,” he had said, “if I don’t want you shot at. Or shoved into the back of some car by the Stasi and never seen again.”
“It’s not like that. It is not remotely like that.” With minor effort, she had levelled her voice. She knows, of course she knows, that it would be obscene, insane, to say that she would prefer it if it were like that. If you really were shoved into the back of a car, you wouldn’t like it, would you: you only think you would, you think your every nerve would come alight, and you’d do something astonishing. “The office is in Copenhagen, for heaven’s sake. They need someone who knows British commercial law, that’s all, while they’re sorting out the interests. It would only be for a year. Eighteen months at most.”
He had rung her in the morning to apologise – “for being parochial; and a few other things” – and to say that she ought to go, if she wanted to, and he’d go with her, if she’d have him. She had said nothing further, then or later. But as he had washed up in her kitchen next evening she had heard him singing, not pitched to carry, but wryly to himself, with the formal, hopeful dolour of a hymn: Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane; Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again … Jeux sans frontières, jeux sans frontières.
***
Almost certainly asleep, his hands lying open and still on the blanket, when there is a clattering just audible from the kitchen, splashing and running water, and then Crispin and Isobel’s voices coming nearer.
“Finished,” calls Crispin, as they come round the corner. “Didn’t miss any spots this time. In fact, added some spots that weren’t on the docket. A giraffe’s worth of spots. A giraffe and a half. Lucky it’s the kind of paint you just mop off if you drop any.”
Isobel turns her face up to the sun and says “Oh, that’s lovely, it was chilly in there.”
The shadow of a birch branch on her cheek, dipping and stroking. In the sunlight all the deep colours come out in her hair, like the ruddy glow in the dark coat of a cat. Then she turns out her hands to take the sun in her palms, and they are green-dyed to the wrist: all their fine lines darkly etched like glaze crackle, and the arms to the elbow daubed, scabbed, sparkling with the mixture of water drops and dried paint.
The paint-patches rough as bark on that thin skin; submerged branchings of veins, long stems of tendon. “You look like a dryad,” she says: and hears what she has said. But she has had the presence of mind to say it with irony, and Isobel catches her eye, and smiles.
“Good Lord, Isobel.” Rendell is sitting up. “I presume some of it went on the walls.”
“Yes, it’s beautiful, only I—”
“Knocked over the cup,” says Crispin, to whom it has never occurred not to interrupt women: who would, to do him justice, interrupt God. “And then tried to pick up the paint—”
“To contain it! I shall never escape calumny.” When Isobel leans back like that, laughing, you see the fortune’s worth of gold in her molars: what you get for eating chocolates in bed every night. More advice, roundly ignored, issued at twenty. “I put my hands round the spill to keep it from running onto the bricks and staining them. It was really extremely sensible of me.”
“It was,” says Rendell, his expression impeccable: only something in the roughened voice that is not solemn or reserved. “More sensible than whoever laid the hearth in such a pale stone. You would never have got it out.”
“Come and see. You were right, it has made the room enormous, like a dream, and we put the last of the roses on the mantel and they are glowing like coals.”
“‘Come and see, you were right’ is a temptation beyond mortal forbearance,” he says, folding the blanket and setting it on the table. “I am coming,” but in beginning to rise he checks, and turns his face against his sleeve to cough; still ordinary, shallow, passing soon enough, but when it has passed his hand is pressed to his chest again.
She glances away, and finds Isobel watching. Most faces, in children of ten, must have this helpless responsiveness, as quick and clear as water; fewer at twenty, not many at thirty. She, who had not had it at ten, looks at her friend and thinks not for the first time: there’s a handicap you could lose, if you only put your mind to it.
What Isobel says is meant for one hearer, and carries no further, when she crosses to him and touches his cheek, her other hand laid over his, the fall of her hair obscuring her face; but his reply is as plain as though intended for entry in the record.
“Oh, really, Isobel, enough. I’m all right.”
If she had been, as she ought to have been, looking away, she would have heard the severity in the voice, the unfeigned impatience: and not seen how his hands had taken hers and though she had made as though to draw away had pulled her nearer, so that their joined hands had been held at extension and brought in again with the gentleness, the grace, of an allemande. But she would have seen, must have seen if she had glanced again, how as the pause drew out still neither let go, but held as close together as boats in harbour.
As she thought it would be: as she would have imagined, had she imagined. In a way easier than watching the intermittent tautness of the kept distance, year after year. Strange to think – absurd, after everything, all this time – that it is Crispin he should have thought she minded. Though, of course, one of the victories of her life.
Speak of the devil. This time it’s Crispin’s eye that meets hers: he too has looked, betrayingly, away.
For a long, ringing instant, she could laugh aloud. Poor sod, you don’t know which one either. When your besetting sin is envy, when you could look at the most miserable wretch and suspect they have something you haven’t, every so often you are compensated with these sudden, extraordinary inversions, when what you feel for the whole world is like pity, shot through with infinite tenderness. She could kiss his cheek, like a brother-in-arms. Of course it’s all right. She can kiss them each, and go.
Whatever he sees in her face, he looks startled; she gives him a recklessly friendly smile, and after a moment, he returns it, and glances away.
“After we’ve all gone and admired the paint drying,” he says in a collecting-the-attentions tone, “what’s the consensus on going out for lunch? We still haven’t tried that pub by the church and it’s only open twelve to two.”
“Oh,” she says, closing one eye and tilting the small silver face of her watch in the sun. “I hadn’t realised it was as late as that. I had better be going, really.”
There is just pause enough to hear the call of a bird she cannot identify; then Rendell clears his throat and says, “Could you stay one more night?”
He is standing with one steadying hand on the back of the iron chair, looking across to her; he has spoken as though they were alone. There is no one who would have told him. Sebastian would not have said a word, nor Sibley: but she thinks now that he would have known what she would say to him, known before she knew, had she found the right moment between them.
“It seems a pity to have you for so little time,” he says, “when you’ve come all this way.” One of her own tricks, to exact the whole of the listener’s focus by the slow measure of the quiet voice. “I realise it’s terribly selfish of me. But I’ve hardly seen you, the last few weeks. And it was such a pleasure to find you had come.”
He has never, in twelve years, asked her to change her arrangements. Whenever in difficulty, grave or trivial, he has always preferred to endure it alone. Three times, ever, that she had judged that she should offer, and each time he had told her brusquely to go.
“As you can see,” puts in Crispin sympathetically, “he’s starved for intelligent conversation”; and Isobel laughs, and says “Yes, it would be a kindness. Dispatches from Rome, for Amphibalus labouring among the heathen. But I would like that too. Very much. If you can.”
Only an instant, thinking it through. She had had the standard Saturday evening plans with Sebastian, but nothing irreproducible; and she sees with the first striking-in of excitement, as when the car crests the hill and the long view opens all at once before you, that after all if he meant what he said then he is to figure more in her plans than anyone she now knows. And he has never spoken a word in jealousy, not of present company: or he would never have figured in her plans from the beginning.
Almost every day for the last six months she has thought, I must tell Rendell this or that; sometimes half risen from her chair to walk down the hall before she remembered. How often, speaking deliberately briefly two miles away on the phone in the evenings, she has wished she could see his face. Twelve years later, to look at him is still more to inhabit than to remember: their mutual incredulity that anyone should seek their own company; that first abrupt, astonishing invitation. How easy, in youth, to change the course of a life.
“Yes,” she says, careful not to say it gently. It is not his, but Isobel’s, whose eye she will not meet. “Yes, I can stay.”
for those interested in 19th-century sickfic/whump
tl;dr went through contemporary pseudo-medical text, collected a reference of symptom descriptions.
so i googled ‘gelsemium’ to identify a plant and got a result for homeopathy. because i am almost as interested in medicine that doesn’t work as medicine that does, i skimmed the page and read ‘fever: wants to be held, because he shakes so’. wow, i thought, that is a line. naturally i ended up going through the whole thing copy-and-pasting like a bizarre webscraper.
the categories are my own and somewhat arbitrary. any pronouns are unchanged from the source.
***
fever and chills:
Cannot bear to be uncovered; wants to be wrapped up warmly.
Chill all over; worse in bed at night. Sensitive to cold trade-winds on Pacific Coast. General sore and bruised feeling.
Chill between 7 and 9 am, preceded by thirst with great soreness and aching of bones; knows chill is coming on because he cannot drink enough.
Chill comes on with much yawning and stretching, lasting all through chill.
Chill predominates; from below upwards. Heat in head and face; hands and feet icy cold, with chill.
Chilliness along spine, with frequent, hot flashes. Yawns and stretches when chilly. Severe aching in shoulders and joints and small of back.
Chilliness between the shoulder-blades; pain and stiffness in back.
Chilliness evenings after lying down and on awakening, without thirst.
Chilliness in chest when walking in open air.
Chilliness; very sensitive to cold air. Creeping, shivering over the whole body. Cold extremities, even in a warm room.
Chilly day and night; always worse during rain.
Chilly even before a fire.
Chilly even in warm room.
Chilly when uncovered, yet feels smothered if wrapped up.
Cold shivering, as if blood were ice-water. Chills run down back.
Cold shivers from any emotion.
Coldness, great sensitiveness to open air; shuddering in back, skin feels warm to touch. Heat in evening.
Coldness, want of animal heat. Sensation as of cold water over parts; general coldness with heat of face.
Coldness, with ill-humour. Shivering after drinking. Chill begins in back; better, heat. Must have something hot to back. Thirst before chill.
Coldness, with pain in long bones.
Fever: post-critical temperature of a remittent type.
First stages of a cold, with chilliness and sneezing.
Great loquacity during fever.
Heat and shuddering alternately. Creeping chilliness, worse in the evening and into night.
Hyperthermy in the evening and hypothermy in the morning.
Icy cold feet, ache as if sprained.
Internal chilliness; shivering, with hot face, cold hands, no thirst. Is always too cold, even in bed.
Open air is felt very, very cold.
Patient feels cold to the very bones. Coldness not relieved by anything.
Sensation as if pierced by needles of ice.
Sensation as if swimming in cold water.
Slight chill, afternoon fever, glowing heat in face, hands, and feet.
Wants to be held, because he shakes so. Chilliness up and down back.
headache:
Aching, tired feeling in eyes, better closing or pressing upon them.
Bruised pain back of the orbits.
Face aches in heated room.
Green colours surround candle-light.
Headache from riding in cold wind.
Headache from the smallest quantity of wine.
Headache of students, and those worn out by fatigue. Headaches are relieved by gentle motion.
Headache, with weary, empty, gone feeling at stomach.
Illusions of vision; fiery, serpentine circles.
Sensation as if all objects were too bright and glittering.
Stars and fiery points float before eyes. Easily fatigued from reading.
respiratory:
All bones and cartilages of chest painful.
Asthma, without anxiety, worse toward morning.
Asthmatic cough; worse at night; lying on right side. Chest very tender. Pain in region of heart.
Bruised pain and weakness in the chest every evening.
Capricious hoarseness; comes and goes.
Catarrhal hoarseness, with scraping in throat. Spasmodic constriction. Cough with sensation as if something were torn loose in chest.
Catarrhal states from cold and damp weather. Irritation of larynx with huskiness; grip, with pleuritic pain.
Constant desire to take a long breath; oppression of chest. Dry cough, day and night.
Cough; as soon as he touches the pillow must get up.
Cough soon after waking in the morning. Talking aggravates soreness of chest.
Cutting pain in chest; worse lying on right side. Hoarseness and loss of voice. Dry, hard cough about 3 am, with stitching pains and dryness of pharynx. Bronchitis, whole chest is very sensitive.
Deep, rough voice, failing on slight exertion. Hoarseness; worse, evenings, talking; evening oppression of breathing, sore and raw chest.
Every cold settles in throat.
Eyes sunken; broad, blue circles around. Violent sneezing. Nose is cold. Must be wrapped up with warm cloths.
Hoarse and choking; chills with cough at night. Cough on coming into the open air. Hay-fever. Spasmodic cough; whooping cough, paroxysms; worse at night.
Hoarseness and cough, with soreness in chest; must support it.
Hoarseness, especially at end of a cold.
Hacking cough. Thorax feels too narrow. Cough often ends in a sneeze. Rattling in chest.
Irrepressible cough from a spot deep in chest, as if raw and sore. Chest weak; can scarcely talk.
Loses voice and coughs when exposed to dry, cold wind. Hoarseness, with loss of voice. Cough troublesome when walking. Cough excited whenever any part of the body gets cold or uncovered, or from eating anything cold. Croup with loose, rattling cough; worse in morning. Rattling, croaking cough.
Loss of voice from walking against the wind. Cough when getting warm in bed.
Nose bleeding after every fit of coughing, dark fluid blood. Nose feels sore; cold.
Sense of lightness and tightness affecting whole body, especially chest.
Sleep prevented by harsh cough.
Spasmodic cough after influenza and after whooping-cough. Cough returns with every fresh cold.
Sub-acute and chronic colds in chest which have extended downwards from head and have fastened themselves upon the bronchial tubes. Stage of resolution of pneumonia slow and delayed.
Throat dry, sore, worse swallowing. Raw and tender. Continued disposition to clear throat. Croupy, hoarse cough with sore throat.
Throat swollen and painful. Everything hawked up streaked with blood.
Tickling in throat, larynx and trachea, chest oppressed, gets out of breath when coughing. Hollow, spasmodic, barking cough, coming from deep in chest.
exhaustion:
A feeling as if it were necessary to keep in motion, or else heart's action would cease.
A general feeling of dullness and malaise, as when a cold is coming on.
After influenza and wasting, exhaustive diseases where there is much weakness and heaviness, slow recovery of nerve power. Sleepy, constant yawning.
Bodily and mental exhaustion; drowsiness after sea bathing.
Bruised, weary feeling in joints, with drawing and stiffness.
Faint on attempting to sit up.
General prostration. Acts as if born tired.
Great fatigue, as from over-exertion; weary after meals.
Great weakness and hunger, yet loses flesh.
"Half dead, half alive feeling" all over.
Limbs and body ache as if beaten; joints as if sprained.
Old burns that do not get well, and ill effects from burns. Cicatrices freshen up; old injuries reopen.
Pulse weak, and quickened by least movement.
Stiffness and lameness across neck and shoulders, after getting cold and wet.
Taste of blood in mouth and throat. Sensation as if heart would stop, with great fear, better sitting up or moving about; worse, when alone, with cold sweat on face.
Tired all over with restlessness.
Tissues are worn out faster than they are repaired.
Very weak and weary, must sit or lie down or lean on something; very averse to meeting strangers.
Violent palpitation induced by slightest exertion, or by laughing, or coughing.
When walking, limbs feel as if made of wood or glass, and would break easily.
sleep:
Anxious, frightful dreams with confused consciousness on waking, so that the dream cannot be rid of and fear of dream remains.
Cannot get fully to sleep. Delirious on falling asleep. Insomnia from exhaustion; from uncontrollable thinking; tobacco. Yawning. Sleepless from nervous irritation.
Cannot sleep after 3 am until towards morning; awakes feeling wretchedly. Drowsy after meals, and in early evening. Dreams full of bustle and hurry. Better after a short sleep, unless aroused.
Cries out during sleep; body jerks; wakes frightened, staring.
Dreams full of care and toil.
Entire inability to sleep; sometimes caused by aching in bones. Dreams, with nightmare. Dreams of cats, black cats. Starting on falling to sleep with chilliness and clamminess.
Fears the night, and the suffering from exhaustion on awakening.
Great apprehension at night, cannot remain in bed.
Imagines, on waking at night, that pieces of furniture are persons; that he hears footsteps in next room.
Restless, with frightful dreams; nightmare, awakes languid and unrefreshed.
Sleep disturbed. Dreams of travelling.
Sleep full of dreams and anguish; jerking and starting during sleep, full of fantasy and illusions; difficult to go to sleep at night, cannot sleep enough in morning; trembling and weak on awaking.
Sleep poor; wakes early. Overpowering sleepiness in daytime. Dreams vivid and distressing.
Sleep unrefreshing; more tired on rising than on retiring.
Sleepless. Thoughts of events of whole past life keep him awake.
Sleepy in forenoon. Nervous jerking during sleep. Dreams of robbers. Sleepless from grief.
Wakes frequently, and becomes wide awake suddenly. Catnaps; slightest noise awakens. Cannot sleep between 2 and 5 am.
Yawning with shivering. Irresistible drowsiness. Vivid, incoherent dreams.
appearance:
At first ruddy glow on cheeks, afterwards death-like pallor.
Blue colour around eyes. Hollow eyes.
Blueness of eyelids.
Bridge of nose as if pinched.
Face feels chapped, as if from cold wind; feels hot.
Face sunken, pale, and bluish. Old man's look; tight drawing of skin over bones.
Face yellow, sallow; red and hot; pain in zygomatic process; feels as if cobwebs were on it.
Face: bones sensitive, especially beneath orbits.
Features sunken. Icy coldness of tip of nose and face. Nose grows more pointed. Face very pale, blue, collapsed, cold.
Pale lips, and corners of mouth cracked.
mood:
Anguish in the evening and night, with thoughts of suicide. The slightest cause irritates him. Dejected and sad.
Apprehensive, depressed; fear of being alone in the dark; great desire to be with people. Tired and irritable.
Cannot bear solitude or darkness; must have light and company.
Cannot concentrate thoughts; brain floats in thousands of problems and grand ideas.
Cannot get herself together, feels scattered about bed. Falls asleep while answering a question.
Changeable disposition. Feels light, as if floating in air. Hallucinations at night. Irritable. Tremulous.
Childish; grief over trifles.
Clairaudient, hears voices far away or of the dead.
Craving for apples. Empty and weak feeling.
Depressed, timid, averse to society, and afraid of being alone.
Depressed; imagines he hears some one talking; dreads to be left alone. Fear of rain.
Depressed; sure of death, and desires it.
Desire for black coffee, stimulants. Aversion to food. Everything tastes flat.
Dread of people, and desire to be alone. Cannot do anything in presence of others. Intensely shy, blushes easily. Music causes weeping.
Emotional excitement, fear, etc, lead to bodily ailments. Bad effects from fright, fear, exciting news. Stage fright.
Everything appears strange and terrible.
Fear in the dark and of some one behind her. Melancholy, with suicidal thoughts.
Fears arrest on account of a supposed crime.
Fears touch, or the approach of anyone.
Fidgety while sitting at work. Music makes her weep. Apprehensive, despondency, indecision.
Fixed ideas, as if a strange person were at his side; as if soul and body were separated. Emotional sensitiveness; music causes weeping and trembling.
Frightful fancies, daring, gay, bright.
He is acutely alive and crazed by a flood of subjective visual impressions and fantastic illusions.
Homesickness, with sleeplessness and disposition to suicide. Wants to be let alone.
Hurried feeling; time passes slowly; melancholy.
Imagining giving wrong things to people, causing their death.
Impatient and vehement; desires many things and cries.
Indifferent to those loved best. Averse to occupation, to family. Irritable; easily offended.
Irritable, arbitrary, must have his own way. Craves company. Energy gone.
Irritable; gets into a passion about trifles. Awkward, hasty. Wants to be alone to cry. Tears with laughter.
Irritable; holds everything in contempt. Full of desires, for what they know not.
Keeps up brightly when in company, much exhausted afterwards, and pains aggravated.
Lively music saddens. Melancholy, with periodical attacks of mania. Suicidal tendency; must exercise restraint. Inability to think. Dislikes to speak, or to be spoken to.
Mania for bathing. Impulse to suicide, particularly by drowning. Easily angered.
Many people in a room seem to take away his breath.
Melancholy; afraid to be alone. Little things annoy, extremely sensitive. Averse to undertaking new things. Headstrong and haughty when sick. Loss of self-confidence. Constant fear of breaking down under stress. Cannot bear to see anything new. Cannot read what he writes. Sadness in morning on awaking.
Melancholy, apprehensive; like from internal grief. Desire to cry, but cannot. Consequences of grief.
Mental weakness and depression; worries; very sensitive to noise; colds, change of weather. Anxious and restless during thunderstorm; worse from music. Marked gayety. Sensitive to presence of certain individuals.
Morbidly conscientious.
Much concerned about his fate. Cross and contradictive; whatever is done fails to give satisfaction. Angry at every little attention. Sentimental mood.
Music is unbearable. Every little noise distresses.
Never wants to be left alone. Never quiet or contented. Obstinate and hypersensitive to pain, noise, touch.
Peculiar mental impulses; fears and anxieties and hidden irrational motives for actions.
Profound, melancholic delusion; feeling of moral deficiency; religious depression; delusions of conspiracies against him. Imagines he is singled out as an object of divine wrath.
Sad in the morning; no desire to mix with the world. Restless and uneasy; does not wish to attend to business; wants to be off somewhere all the time.
Sad, hopeless. Intensely sympathetic. Ailments from long-lasting grief, sudden emotions.
Scratching on silk or linen or paper unbearable.
Sings, talks, but does not answer.
Sudden alteration of mood. Foxy. Destructive impulses; moral relaxation. Must constantly busy herself or walk. Sensitive to music. Averse to company, but wants some one present. Ungrateful, discontented. Guided by whims.
Tendency to cry over little things.
Thinks he is double, or some one else lying alongside. Feels that death is near, and must hurry to settle affairs. Irritable, easily offended, vexed at everything.
Violent fright from report of a gun, even at a distance.
Weeps easily. Timid, irresolute. Fears in evening to be alone, dark, ghost. Likes sympathy. Easily discouraged. Morbid dread of the opposite sex. Religious melancholy. Given to extremes of pleasure and pain. Highly emotional. Mentally, an April day.
Whole body feels as if caged, each wire being twisted tighter.
Worries over trifles; impulsive thoughts of suicide; constant state of fear and nervousness. Headache makes him apprehensive about trifles; worse going upstairs or rapid motion.
constitutions:
Abnormal sensitiveness to damp and cold, inability to live near fresh water, lakes, rivers, etc, or in damp, chilly places.
A human "thermometer", sensitive to heat and cold.
Acts best on the dark complexioned and past middle life.
Best adapted to persons intellectually keen, but of weak muscular power.
Especially adapted to the light-complexioned, narrow-chested subjects. Lax fiber, low recuperative powers, and very susceptible to changes in the weather. Patient always tired; motion causes intense fatigue; aversion to work; wants constant changes. When symptoms are constantly changing and well-selected remedies fail to improve, and cold is taken from the slightest exposure. Rapid emaciation. Very sensitive, mentally and physically. General exhaustion. Nervous weakness.
Especially adapted to the nervous temperament - women of sensitive, easily excited nature, dark, mild disposition, quick to perceive, rapid in execution. Rapid change of mental and physical condition, opposite to each other. Great contradictions. Alert, nervous, apprehensive, rigid, trembling patients who suffer acutely in mind or body, at the same time made worse by drinking coffee. Effects of grief and worry.
For those who are compelled to work, on an insufficient amount of sleep.
Hydrogenoid constitutions, whose blood is morbidly hydroscopic, so that damp air and water are inimical. Complaints from moonlight. Rapid exhaustion and emaciation.
Indicated for the so-called hydrogenoid constitution, where the complaints are such as are due to living in damp houses, basements, cellars. They are worse in rainy weather, water in any form. Feels every change from dry to wet; cannot even eat plants growing near water, nor fish. Always feels best in warm, dry air.
Pain is excessive and out of all proportion to injury. Great disposition to take cold, especially in damp weather.
Patient is cold, chilly, hugs the fire, wants plenty warm clothing, hates drafts, hands and feet cold, worse in winter. Lack of vital heat. Prostration of mind and body. Great sensitiveness to taking cold. Intolerance of alcoholic stimulants.
Patient faints easily, is worn out, and must have fresh air. Persons who have never fully recovered from the effects of some previous illness.
Patient seeks the open air; always feels better there, even though he is chilly.
Sensitive, irritable, thirsty, hot, and numb. Oversensitiveness from abuse of coffee and narcotics.
Tall, bloodless patients, with nervous chills.
Tall, slender persons, narrow-chested, with thin, transparent skin, weakened by loss of animal fluids, with great nervous debility, emaciation, amative tendencies. Great susceptibility to external impressions, to light, sound, odours, touch, electrical changes, thunder-storms.
Typical patient is rather thin, spare, quick, active, nervous, and irritable. He does a good deal of mental work; has mental strains and leads a sedentary life, found in prolonged office work, overstudy, and close application to business, with its cares and anxieties. This indoor life and mental strain seeks stimulants, coffee, wine, possibly in excess; or, again, he hopes to quiet his excitement, by indulging in the sedative effects of tobacco, if not really a victim to the seductive drugs, like opium, etc.
Very sensitive to cold. Patient is weak, emaciated, cold and chilly, but worse from being overheated; sensitive generally.
Young weakly persons, anaemic and chlorotic, with pseudo-plethora, who flush easily; cold extremities; oversensitiveness; worse after any active effort.
Zealous fiery temperament. Patients are easily chilled, avoid open air.
better and worse:
Better as day advances.
Better: warmth, fasting, resting in bed.
Better immersing in hot water; worse, change of weather; from being quiet; when beginning to move; great sensitiveness to cold.
Better in open air and company.
Better, by placing hands in cold water.
Better, in open air, uncovering, and cold bathing.
Better, in the dark, from wrapping up.
Better, when occupied mentally or physically.
Dreads approach of thunder-storms; heaviness of limbs.
Many symptoms are better after a storm has thoroughly set in, especially after an electric storm.
Marked improvement of all symptoms while riding in a carriage.
Sensitive to a falling barometer; cold and dampness brings on many complaints.
Worse for every change of weather.
Worse, after midnight, lying down, on getting warm in bed, drinking, singing, laughing.
Worse, alcohol (falls after one or two drinks of whisky). Tea (marked aversion).
Worse, at night, sundown to sunrise, seashore, in summer. Better, inland and mountains, during day, moving about slowly.
Worse, at night; wet, cold weather. Better, walking and warmth.
Worse, before a storm. All symptoms reappear in rough weather, night, towards morning. Better, after the storm breaks, warmth, and eating.
Worse, by heat, anger, open air, wind, night. Better, from being carried, warm wet weather.
Worse, cold air, after eating, standing.
Worse, cold and cold drinks, full moon. Better, warm food and drink, wrapped up.
Worse, cold and cold washing, dampness, before a snowstorm. Better, warmth, pressure, rubbing. Combing hair.
Worse, damp weather, fog, before a thunderstorm, emotion, or excitement, bad news, tobacco-smoking, when thinking of his ailments; at 10 am. Better, open air, continued motion, stimulants.
Worse, dampness, before and during a thunder-storm, from riding in cars, passive motion; in winter, eating, from mental states. Better, warm air; lying with head high; dry weather.
Worse, evening; night and open air; cold; from fat food, butter, coffee, milk, warm damp weather; wine.
Worse, exposure to damp, cold weather, melting snow. Better, in summer; warm, dry atmosphere.
Worse, from evening, until midnight, and when sitting in warm room; warm damp weather when at rest and lying left side. Better, from any motion; exercise, at sea.
Worse, from exposure on damp ground.
Worse, from mental disturbance, during winter and spring.
Worse, from snow-air; water, cool moist air, touch.
Worse, in cold dry weather; penetrating sounds. Better, from washing; in damp and wet weather.
Worse, in cold weather when getting cold. Many complaints come on only in winter; from sunset to sunrise.
Worse, in cold; dampness; in a fog; in close room; least exposure; touch. Better, bending head backward.
Worse, in damp, heavy, cloudy weather; from sitting on cold stones or pavements.
Worse, in dark room, when alone, looking at bright or shining objects, after sleep, on swallowing. Better, from bright light, company, warmth.
Worse, in evening, indoors, warmth; south winds; from light. Better, from coffee, in dark.
Worse, in warm room, on awakening. Better, from bathing or cold air; from putting feet in hot water.
Worse, morning, mental exertion, after eating, touch, spices, stimulants, narcotics, dry weather, cold. Better, from a nap, if allowed to finish it; in evening, while at rest, in damp, wet weather, strong pressure.
Worse, motion, music; before a storm; standing; dampness; from draught; early morning, and after sleep. Better, open air.
Worse, motion, night, contact, cold air. Better, warmth.
Worse, music; presence of strangers; from any unusual thing; morning, warm room. Better, slow motion in open air; cold drinks.
Worse, noise, music, warm room, lying down about 10 am, at seashore, mental exertion, consolation, heat, talking. Better, open air, cold bathing, going without regular meals, lying on right side; pressure against back, tight clothing.
Worse, northwest wind; lying down.
Worse, open air, motion, contact, atmospheric changes, wet, stormy weather, evening. Cold air brings on all sorts of ailments.
Worse, rainy, changeable weather, approach of storm, motion; 4 pm.
Worse, sensitive to electric changes. Effects of a wetting, when it rains, exposure to damp, cold weather, night exposure, motion, right side. Better, warmth, dry weather, rest.
Worse, touch; physical or mental exertion; twilight; warm food or drink; change of weather, from getting wet in hot weather; evening; during a thunder-storm; ascending stairs. Better, in dark, cold food; cold; open air; washing with cold water; sleep.
Worse, wet weather, after midnight; from cold, cold drinks, or food. Seashore. Right side. Better from heat; from head elevated; warm drinks.
Worse, when sitting erect, after meals and music. Better, when stomach is empty; in open air.
Worse, when thinking of ailment, from daylight to sunset, heat, inland. Better, at the seashore, lying on stomach, damp weather.
***
n.b. although publication date 1901 i said 19th century because the language is, for obvious reasons, characteristic of 1880s–1890s (i suppose technically it’s victorian-era if you aren’t particular about the month). n.b. also, there are like nine more encyclopedia quackerae on the same site that i have not even attempted because i had to draw the line somewhere, but if you like this sort of thing there’s lots.
Love train 🚂💖💖💖! Send this to all the blogs you love! Don’t forget to spread the love! 😊
belatedly: hi! i appreciate the whistle stop in what may look like a ghost town. (this blog has a definite aestivation period but cracks an eye open every september.) thank you for thinking of me.
the gentleness in someone drawing a phone conversation to a close, having observed that the other person sounds ill or tired, by saying ‘i had better let you go’.
@sevenall rendell and the river, crispin and the sea.
as for the parallels, what you had correctly observed is that there aren’t many. the mechanism of crispin’s peril is in a sense irrelevant, since the structure of canon ensures no true harm can come - he might as well be tied to the railroad tracks in a négligée; he doesn’t so much as get his feet wet. there is no aftermath or resolution in canon, as the conventions of the form deem none necessary, and i too leave him unmoved by the moment of danger.
so. what happens to rendell?
the fifth novel begins with an apparently ordinary client and case of his, which by unfortunate coincidence - something overheard at an unrelated social event - he realises is not aboveboard, and begins to investigate, and gets into trouble. sibley is away throughout and can’t be reached; valeria is the one who finally pieces it all together. rendell is missing for a few days, though for most of it he isn’t in any danger or being held against his will; it’s one of those left-a-message-with-the-temporary-typist setups where he thinks he’s told people where he’s going, which at least gives the other three a head start on looking for him. things are complicated by the discovery of the body of a man who looks uncannily like him, and who - though he and rendell never met - turns out to have known many of the same people, à la bleak house. the villain, the victim, and the majority of their extended circle are gay men; there’s no sexual element, in the sense of either romance or violence - the crime is money laundering, by a relatively unimportant british national skimming from larger soviet-afghan war profiteers - but it makes it still more difficult to establish connections in the investigation, since most of those involved have more than one reason for claiming not to know anybody else.
yes, yes, so what actually happens, you say politely. i have been evading this for a reason, i reply. the truth is that i never know what happens in any piece of fiction until i write it, which is often different from any summary attempted in advance. i am at least certain where the action happens, which is one of the water’s-edge warehouses or factories on the isle of dogs in the derelict years. i think rendell goes out there on the correct suspicion that the address of the attached office is a front and ends up locked in it by his client - call him charles - who is very jumpy with the consciousness of having got far in over his head, and doesn’t initially realise who he’s trapped; then, having incriminated himself, doesn’t know what to do with rendell. they have known each other socially for years. they have some deeply weird through-the-door conversations and negotiations, neither of them handling it very strategically or well (rendell, especially, starts off in exactly the wrong accusatory manner, and totally bypasses the chance to take the position of ‘give me a cut, i’ll help you’; charles being desperate for an ally, this would have worked.) after a while, charles leaves.
the building is partially flooded, unmistakably tidally, and is in such disrepair as to suggest that escape might be feasible. (it is, in fact, by several routes. rendell takes the hardest.) he gets cold and wet and bruised early on, trying to find a way out. when i was first thinking about all this, long ago, i really wanted him to be physically marked by whatever happened, injured at least cosmetically; i think at the time i imagined violence but now i prefer it if it’s entirely environmental.
he has to give up maddeningly early in the evening; it’s january, dark by five, and the building has long since had the electricity shut off. he has a good wool coat, which he had the forethought not to get wet, and sitting wrapped in it with his arms about his knees he is able for a time to stop shivering. the rain sounds distant and lovely on the thin corrugated roof. he can hear turnstones and curlews calling at dawn.
when it’s full daylight, he does find a way out, following the water into the river. he has to get up all his nerve, and dive through an opening under the surface. he tries to time it at low tide, not especially accurately, but even at the lowest the river is still high - it’s been raining heavily for weeks - and running fast. he leaves his suit jacket and coat behind.
valeria arrives at the office not long after (crispin and isobel off following a red herring) and finds the car rendell’s hired. everything seems deserted. she gets into the larger building by a side-door - it’s only pushed to, and padlocked with a chain that’s easily cut; it was never planned that it should hold a prisoner - and finds a jacket and coat she recognises, set aside above the black water lapping at the broken floor.
she is still calm. she goes back outside: sheer walls at the waterline; he hasn’t got back up that way. a technical exercise: which way would the current have carried him, if he got in at low tide and couldn’t get out of it? she estimates a trajectory and finds a place to get down onto some open shore, and starts off at the fastest pace she can sustain. it is raining gently. the light is going out of the sky. she has a very indifferent torch. she is on the verge of turning around when she finds him, lying at the water’s edge.
for close to a minute, she is not certain that he is alive. his eyes are not closed, but he doesn’t recognise her, or track her movements at first. he is breathing very slowly. he’s inhaled a little brackish water: just a little. at the time, that is not the problem. he’s not a particularly good swimmer, but he was not in the river all that long, and he got his head above the surface very quickly. the kind of thing where, on television, the hero would pop out and keep running; but if you have been under cold water in winter, you know why he could not.
he is very lucky: he would not have lasted the night. he’s also lucky his heart doesn’t stop when she forces him to sit up, or gets his shirt off to put her coat around him, or gets him to his feet; she leaves bruises on his arms. i think she does know you’re not supposed to shake someone with hypothermia, but it’s the one moment her objectivity fails her; her single thought is getting him to her car, where she can put the heat on and he’ll be out of the rain.
she does have the presence of mind at this juncture to call for help. she doesn’t have a mobile phone - i’m a little stricter about chronology than caudwell, and in the year i’ve chosen it’s unlikely even an early adopter would have one - but she does have a borrowed burndept radio. valeria in canon seems to know a lot of journalists, who always know a lot of people in the police and fire services, and she has called in all her favours. she’s able to reach someone - though the reception is so awful she’s not sure she’s been heard - and transmit the address, and say that she’s found someone who needs help.
it’s a long, bad walk. without her coat she’s shivering violently, to her exasperation; rendell is long past that stage. she is more or less dragging him along, in the near-dark, over the river silt and broken stone. later she finds she’s badly scraped the wrist and palm of one hand, though she doesn’t remember how, or notice at the time. there’s a steep slope up to the road and she thinks they won’t make it: they nearly don’t, but at last they reach the fenced lot of the office, in which she does not at first notice there are now three cars under the single sodium light.
charles has come back, with a gun and a poorly-considered plan. rendell would not have got out alive. but he’s arrested in his intention by the sight of his prisoner free, and accompanied. charles and valeria each begin to speak: then her radio crackles. she and rendell are largely in shadow, and she’s wearing dark, practical clothing. in an instant, she realises that charles, gun in hand, thinks she’s police, or worse.
as we have seen her do in canon, she thinks very, very fast. she’s never met him: she doesn’t know if it is him. but she gambles, and says his name - easily, as though he is a friend she has hoped to find. she can hear the fear in his voice when he answers, and the fatal relief. after that, she doesn’t find it intellectually difficult. she tries to indicate by the pressure of her arm that rendell should keep silent; he has revived enough to recognise her, but he is, helpfully, not really able to speak. she takes a fairly standard ‘we know everything, but we can protect you’ line with charles. she doesn’t do it perfectly, but she doesn’t have to; she is not exactly dealing with the napoleon of crime. he has lowered the gun, though not turned it away. ten more minutes and she would have had him. then they hear a siren, coming nearer.
it’s an ambulance, not police, but he’s rattled and he isn’t thinking straight enough to tell the difference. he makes one last bad decision, puts the gun under his chin, and pulls the trigger.
(when valeria later apologises for making rendell think of this, it’s needless; he doesn’t remember any of it. she never forgets.)
this is where the canon structure would draw to a close, fade to black, and then give us an epilogue a little later in which all is explained, dryly, easily, over drinks, in warmth and candlelight. that is also what rendell endeavours to have happen; and it does happen, after a fashion. that’s the end of the novel. but that is not the end.
rendell is treated for hypothermia and goes home as soon as he can. it’s not that they don’t do a chest x-ray, or know that he breathed in some river water; he’s coughing quite a lot. but the inflammation is minor, and though he’s briefly run a fever, it seems to have passed by the time they let him go. he’s twenty-nine, a little thin and understandably tired but with no noted underlying conditions or significant medical history; he’s well-educated and well-off; he’s registered with an excellent gp surgery. it is the correct clinical decision.
he would, in fact, have probably been fine, if he had been able to rest properly, or sought advice when he didn’t get better. crispin, in his place, would have been fine. but rendell wants to pretend that nothing happened, and the preceding long interval of exhaustion and depletion is against him. the inflammation doesn’t clear quickly enough, and a persistent infection sets in.
even then, there’s no dramatic sudden deterioration, not at first. he’s young, he’s grown up with every advantage, he still has a decent immune response as a baseline (though not what it was after the recurrence of mononucleosis, coming back from venice the year before). but he’s sleeping very poorly, and not eating enough to break even - he does make the sensible effort, but his throat hurts, his chest hurts, he doesn’t want anything, and much of the time he’s feverish and losing energy as heat. even then, there are intervals where he’s a bit better, and days when he feels almost normal, if exhausted; even then, he himself thinks he’ll recover, given time. he finds comfort in normalcy, and he’s competent and disciplined enough to keep up appearances, for the most part. but all the while he is losing ground.
(it’s not, either, that no one notices: it’s obvious. but when the framing is ‘something bad happened and now he’s getting over it’, it’s hard to know when to say it’s been too long, and rendell himself, plainly unhappy to be asked, says he’s all right. isobel knows he isn’t but has a little too much faith in him; valeria is, to some extent, wilfully not seeing it. crispin, who sees him daily, is the one with the greatest sense of danger: once he finds rendell asleep at his desk with his head on his arms, and can do nothing, in despairing anger, but keep watch. crispin is wrong, for the record, when he thinks he has never looked at anyone with the terror of love.)
rendell is able to keep this up for what feels, for everyone involved, like an eternity: mid-january to march. but eventually, inevitably, he gets an ordinary cold, it goes straight to his chest, and the low-level chronic infection worsens very quickly. the morning after he first comes out to isobel’s house, he wakes with a high temperature and some difficulty breathing. crispin, almost grateful for a precipitating crisis, puts it to him: look, we can go back to london if you like, but you are going to be seen today. rendell, deeply frightened though doing his best not to show it, puts up no argument. they wake isobel, and leave.
he’s in hospital for almost a week. he doesn’t remember much of this interval, either; the fever takes a long while to come down. this time the damage is permanent, though he gets off lightly, all things considered. the lung scarring is much milder than it might have been, and remains more or less stable over time; it’s part luck, part vigilant treatment, that a few later chest infections worsen it only slightly. he is, as in his own private formulation, always going to have to be careful, but in the end his life is not notably worse, or shorter, as a result.
from one angle, you could say the resolution is swift: the only person who means him harm is dead within a day. from another, you could say it is never resolved, in the sense of being over and done with. it’s perhaps easier to divide it into two instances, january and march.
for january, the two people i want to talk about are sibley and valeria. crispin and isobel never know what it was like, since by the time either sees rendell again he is himself, if not well. sibley, learning what’s happened on their return, feels appallingly guilty, which they know is not rational. but rendell has always been their favourite - for what, again, they know is no good reason; isobel and valeria were both, frankly, much more interesting students - and they have, by that point in their lives, acquired the arrogance to believe that they should have somehow known and protected him. they never show it or mention it, but it colours every subsequent interaction. sibley also feels a debt to valeria, who reminds them of their younger self and of a few other women they once knew who were calm under fire; this does show, in the sense that their entire network of usually-confidential connections opens up for valeria, and every time sibley knows she’s interested in something they suggest, as though idly, that she might benefit from going to lunch with so-and-so; here’s the number.
as for valeria herself - well, in thinking about all this i hared off and started writing something with her, as one does. but what i will say here is that valeria, like crispin, makes many of her decisions in the interests of remaining free and unattached, and she is better at it than he is, at least until she has her daughter. she never discusses with anyone, ever, what finding rendell was like. she is as distressed as isobel (who is remembering crispin! something i put in wholly for my own awful enjoyment, and never thought i’d have reason to mention) on this occasion, and more vividly, recently reminded; but even rendell, distracted by isobel as everyone always is, doesn’t put that together.
for march, i wanted a reversal that brought isobel and crispin in while sparing valeria (who in turn never knows what a near thing that was). i wanted rendell to be, as it were, saved twice, once by his best friend and once by his eventual romantic partners, since rendell/isobel/crispin has been my endgame for like twenty years now. (i also have always absolutely loved valeria with camilla in book two - you make it sound as if you’d be doing me a favour !!! - and wanted to use her as a hero.) you can see my good judgement ending where caudwell would have stopped, and my ridiculous tragedy-hound id taking over. if i were writing for money, or even for fandom publication, i would have the sense to stop. but here we are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
you could say that the aftermath lasts, with isobel and crispin, as long as he lives: as long as all their lives. none of them, in their different ways, ever get over it. the shadow or echo of those few months is still present twenty years later in the way they interact when, say, crispin, at fifty, glances at rendell and thinks he sounds hoarse and looks tired. what i wanted to do with it is the thing i always want, which is the excuse to give someone in fiction the terrible, heightened pressing-on-the-place-that-hurts gaze that comes with acute consciousness of mortal fragility. rendell already has it, bleakly, by the year i’ve chosen. isobel has it in flashes. crispin has it not at all. at the beginning, rendell knows he could lose them; by the end, they know they could lose him. that’s not, of course, all that brings or keeps them together: each of them is drawn to the others by interest, pleasure, challenge, joy, exasperation, laughter. for all my monotonous minor key, i am not, really, writing a tragedy; i’m writing three people who are ultimately very happy. but once you have seen it, as rendell would put it, you cannot forget.
(whew. anyone who’s read to the end: name your prize.)
someone in a formal audience, a lecture, a concert, a performance, sitting for a while with their back and shoulders tensed at the verge of shivering: then as unobtrusively as possible, not breaking their gaze, raising their folded coat from behind them to pull around their shoulders again. not putting their arms into the sleeves, as might be mistaken for signalling departure; but the collar turned up, and the lapels drawn together, held with one hand folded high on their chest. perhaps the space is grand and hard to heat, with a high ceiling and tall windows that draw out all the warmth; but perhaps it’s smaller, densely spaced with old iron radiators, and rather close and hot, so that a glance round the room shows most in shirtsleeves or thin dresses, and only one outlier - their gaze abstracted, their cheeks a touch flushed, all their attention still elsewhere - not yet even noticing that they are the only one to have replaced their heavy coat.
