Eventually they moved on to talk again about paints and dadoes and carved mantelpieces, until they went in to dinner, Gibby sitting at the head of the table as though he had always assumed that position in the household, Lucius humbly off to the side, saying whatever he thought might amuse them.
And at night she lay in the arms of Ash’s best friend, or so he had been, Gibby’s taut muscles almost crushing her frail chest, her full breasts, her tiny waist, sucking the wind out of her, so that the only name she could call was Gibby’s.
And Ash lay where? And with whom? Word had reached her, of course, about his escapades, and her face reddened at the thought. Fight back, Rose had said. Fight back with love. But this love, where was she to find it in her heart?
She always forgot, neglected to put into the equation, the degree to which Ash had loved his father, how he had learned from him to fly-fish, first on the back lawn and then in the river, the pride he took in every one of the boy’s catches, even if they let them go, teaching him the practicality of hunting, a deer for the winter in the giant freezer, the thrill of the pull of the fish, the jerk in the line, the awkward battle for a seven-year-old, shooting a duck and hanging it on the back porch to season until Priscilla said it was ready to roast, how to sit astride a horse, how to take an oxer, even at seven, how sport was about not being afraid, about looking beyond the jump and never lowering your head as it approached. One of the great rules for life as well as the show ring: Keep your head high and look past the jump.
They sat together on the back porch one evening as the sun went down, shucking corn for the water already boiling.
Copperton said, “Who would you be if you were never afraid?”
“I would be a giant. I would be able to fly, Father.”
“Remember this, son. Never be afraid, and only do the things you can do well. Choose carefully. And also remember: all people are alike. Rich and poor. Black and white. They all put their pants on one leg at a time. And they deserve your respect. Many of them need help. Always give it with an open heart. It is always possible to be kind. Whatever else you do in life, never forget kindness.”
And at that moment, listening from the door, Diana realized that she, too, had learned something about love that she would never forget. And the love she had felt, once, for a time, for Copperton, blossomed again in her heart.
Copperton said to the boy, “One last thing: the Bible says ‘Love is stronger than death.’ Do you understand?”
“Not really.” Ash looked at his father, afraid of disappointing him, but with a gaze that was so filled with love.
“It doesn’t matter if you understand now. But can you remember it? Can you do that for your old papa?”
“Love is stronger than death. Did I get it right?”
“Perfect. Keep that in a little box in your mind, keep it safe, and one day you’ll understand it. Now let’s go in to supper. How long do we boil the corn for?”
“Five minutes.”
“And not one second more.”
Apparently Copperton could turn his affections on and off when he felt like it—especially for Ash—so days went by when the Captain didn’t notice the boy in the slightest way. Ash would sit outside his father’s door for hours, waiting for him to come out, but when he did, he would pass Ash without a word or a glance, as though he didn’t exist. He would sit silent at dinner, drinking glass after glass of wine, grunting at the food, pushing it away in disgust, putting his boots on the table, a smirk at his wife that said “I dare you to say something.”
Ash could never predict which father he would get—loving and kind, or the immutable rock. He lived a life of constant anxiety. Not that people called it that in those days. They would just say he was a nervous, moody child.
Ash never forgot any of it. He grew to be a deeply kind but nervous man, his eyes always beyond the jump. Diana, on the other hand, was still trying to make Copperton love her. The night after she overheard father and son discussing life as they knew it, she walked with Copperton up the stairs, carrying a very sleepy Ash in her arms. So big he was. She hadn’t noticed. Together they gave him his bath, and put him in his pajamas, and then he sat on the floor while Diana brushed his hair dry and Copperton read to him from an illustrated book about King Arthur. Together they put him to bed and said his prayers, and kissed him good night, leaving the nightlight on because he was afraid of the dark.
Without a word, and with complete understanding. Diana led Copperton to her bed, and took him to her in a way that hadn’t happened since their marriage, with a tenderness and love that didn’t need to be spoken.
He was soft and kind and considerate, and she began to think that perhaps they could truly be husband and wife, that they could tramp the fields and swim the river as a threesome, without all the anxiety and bitterness.
When it was done, he didn’t immediately rise from the bed, as he usually did, but lay in her arms, idly kissing her from time to time.
“Cop—” She started to speak.
“Shhhhh . . .”
And so they lay, complete in their comfort for the first time in their marriage, the rages stilled, like the water of the river after a storm has passed, leaving a halcyon stretch of blue green, the ducks in V-shaped armada, the kind of moment when you suddenly see the natural world and find it the most amazing thing imaginable.
They made love a second time, more sweetly even than the first, and then he did rise from the bed.
“Copperton? Husband?”
He turned to look at her.
“I won’t lock the door. Let’s begin again. This minute. This second. Let’s begin again and be a comfortable couple.”
He came and knelt by the side of the bed and laid his head on her breast. He didn’t say anything, and she didn’t either. She just let him cry until he raised his head and looked at her for a very long time.
In his voice there was the rasp of genuine emotion. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
At the door he turned. “Are you happy, darling?”
“I wasn’t, but I could be. Let’s be happy together. For us. For Ash.”
So they tried. They tried so hard it broke their hearts.
They say that all families are either about the parents or the children. In the last months of Copperton’s life, they tried to make their marriage about Ash. They tried to find their love through him. And night after night, after the bathing ritual, he came to her a different man from the man she had married, gentler, kinder, more attentive, and she in turn was more giving, more open. It wasn’t ecstasy. It wasn’t an explosion of passion. But she dropped her disdain and took him as he was, and he dropped his secret fear of her, his envy of her bloodline, all the things he could never be, and they found a kind of comfort they could live with, and that’s more than most people get.
And they watched as Ash began to heal, to be more self-assured, less tentative, more adventurous. He had always acted around them as though something were about to happen, something he didn’t understand. Now he sat with them comfortable as the ducks on the water, rising and falling with the tides. To him, they were no longer separate people, each filling a separate need; they were one being, interchangeable, and each was always willingly there when he needed one or the other.
Who would you be if you weren’t afraid?
And then Copperton died. And then he stayed dead. He stayed, winter and summer, in a mausoleum he had designed, too grand, too lachrymose, in the graveyard on the hill, and Diana and Ash would walk up there every day and she would wander and watch while Ash spoke to his father, whispered, as though he still lived and breathed. At the end of each of these conversations, as darkness fell and Priscilla called from far away, in the kitchen, Ash would kiss the cold, ornate marble and whisper, “Love is stronger than death. I remember. Good night, dear Papa.”
Then came the thin-fingered men and the reading of the will, and she, in her bitterness, forgot all the joys and comforts of their rapprochement.
&n
bsp; Every baby is born with such tenderness and kindness in its heart, such a graciousness and a gracefulness in its way of going, as they say in equestrian circles. What had happened to Ash, to Diana before him?
Damage. It was all damage that could not be undone. Ash was risking his heritage for a forbidden love, and Diana was risking it all for the imperatives of her body and her long-unloved heart. Nobody could ever know what it was like to sit there in that behemoth day after day, alone, with one book after another from her grandfather’s library, peaceful, so they said, lovely and peaceful, when the few sad aristocratic neighbors came to call, everybody calling each other Missus or Miss, women she had known for thirty-five years, but what it really was, was searingly lonely. The sadness when she pulled back the covers every night, the crisp whisper making her want to scream, to throw something, to look at the window and wonder if it was high enough.
This time the damage would be mammoth, and it could not be reversed. Her love for Gibby was like a wrecking ball ready to be swung at any minute. Months had passed, and he was still here, and she had a thousand ways of saying she didn’t want him to leave, ever, but she didn’t say them. She just let it all ride, and a peace formed in her heart built around his love, a peace unlike anything she had ever known.
With Ash gone, they explored the night like naked, provocative children. When Gibby made love to her, she wept. When he brushed away the tears and asked their cause, she held tight to his hand, but she looked far in the distance and kept her silence.
She should let Gibby go now, before the irreversible damage, the cruelty, the wreckage, began. But she would not, could not let go.
Let the house fall down around her, around them all, let the library at Alexandria burn again. She would burn the topless towers of Illium to keep him by her side.
She had harnessed his red hair, so startling, so fine, to her heart, and she would go, helpless, where it led her.
25
SHE OPENED THE door at three, naked. He stood in front of her, too shy to knock, even now, after countless nights, in his ratty wool bathrobe. He could see she was cold. He stepped toward her, opening the robe, and she stepped inside as he wrapped it around both of them. They were almost the same height, their skin ruddy on porcelain white, their hair ginger against black. She shivered, but not for any reason he could know.
At what point does desire turn to love? At what point does sex no longer matter, no matter how much of a joy it might be? He was walking her to the bed, their legs moving in unison, and she wanted to say, Can we not? Can we be together, just like this, until the sun begins to come up?
She had spent her days watching the river. It held all of her heart. It was her conversation and her memory. It was her Christmas present and her Easter basket. Some days it was smooth as plate glass, and she took her mood from that, placid, the brown of the shallows leading into the deep, deep blue of the deeper waters, the far shore, the Northern Neck, as it was called, as far as the moon to her.
She had hardly ever been there, except to go to Belle Isle, another grand house, where she played as a child and dined as a woman, from which she could see the sunset and her own house, massive even at a distance. It was like looking in Alice’s mirror, exciting and somewhat disturbing. People live there, she thought, and then, suddenly, I live there. Those lights in the window always called her home.
It was the time just after sunset, that fifteen minutes after the great fire, when the embers of the sun spread across the blotter of the deepening sky, pink and orange and gold streaks, brushstrokes of light that lifted her heart out of her body and closer to the risen Lord of her childhood, the Christ who had abandoned her years before. Over her bed hung a round plaster Della Robbia cast of the baby Jesus, and she kept it there even though she no longer believed because somehow, as long as it hung where it had always been, her childhood, her lovely childhood, would not vanish. It held her in its embrace, and made her remember that she was loved.
So, alone, she was afraid, because she knew how it ended. The thoughts she always avoided came crowding into her head, like an addict dreaming of the house parties they used to have, the money they wasted, the love that was not love, all the years she did not look at the sunset, did not live in the afterglow, in the streaks and strokes of heaven’s extraordinary palette.
Downstairs, in the darkened kitchen, sat Lucius Walter, in his underwear and his tatty bathrobe. His work had been finished weeks before, but he didn’t want to leave, he couldn’t. There was nowhere for him to go. So he told nobody, and nobody seemed to notice; the house was such a swirl of painters and plasterers and glaziers. He just kept out of everybody’s way. He had become like a piece of furniture that had sat in the same corner for years. If asked, Diana would have looked at it with wonder, surprised to find it there, trying to remember where it might have come from.
Every night he sat in the kitchen as he always had, a book open in front of him, and the iron, picking the odd silverfish from the pristine surface, listening to the sounds of the house. He had figured it all out. He was not a stupid man, and he knew it would end in tragedy.
For Diana, upstairs in bed with Gibby, it didn’t feel tragic. Lying in Gibby’s arms, Gibby kissing her neck, Gibby’s hands gently opening her up. She had always desired him, of course she had, since the moment she saw him, but now she was racing toward the moment he was inside her and she felt that unique feeling of being at home, at home in the dark, no longer a single person but a woman made of two people, she was racing toward that, but she bent back her head and said so that he could hear, “I love you.” He didn’t pause. She took his head in her hands and pulled him up so he could look in her eyes, “I said, and you have to listen, I love you, Gibby. I will love you forever. There are no secrets. Copperton used to hurt me. He belittled me and debased me. We had maybe eight happy months together.” She started gently to cry. “But I love you now and forever. You.”
He looked at her a long time, and then he laughed sweetly. “You talk a lot, you know that?” His whole face was illuminated with tears of happiness, and then he looked at her very seriously. “I’ve never had anybody. Shuttled around. Got where I was only because I could do the Iron Cross at fourteen. Plus I had an Ivy League brain, and that got me there, and that got me here. I never had parents. I never had girlfriends. I never saw much except the inside of a gym. It was a hard life. You are the only comfort I’ve ever known. And whatever happens—and I’m so sad to say this, but something will, I don’t know what, but something. So believe me when I tell you when I say that I’ve never said it before, and I know in my heart I’ll never say it again. I love you, Diana. I promise you that you have my whole self. I love you.”
How could he lie on top of her with his whole massive body and yet feel so weightless, like a light summer blanket? Did he even know what love was? Did she? Did anybody?
She raised herself up and kissed him until they were both breathless.
They drew apart. He smiled and said, “Now I’ve knocked at the door long enough. Will you let me in?”
They heaved and humped and slithered in their own sweat for half an hour, they turned and tumbled and grasped, until two people became one, until the music of time stopped, until thought became a vast desert in which nothing existed except this one being they had made, one thought, one body that was not a body but only a yearning, that was only what a kiss became, something like a deer in the rearview mirror, the narrowness of the escape, the realization that they had not hit him but glided on unfettered, no future, no past, no sky or sea, no war, no discussion of ideas, no art, no money, no youth or age, just two bodies conjoined to make this one, this one thing, until both were spent with no more to take or to give. She slipped from the bed and came back with hot linen cloths and bathed their slick bodies until the cloths grew cold and they shivered with the dawn air. She stood on the bed and spread her arms like an eagle, and then fell, knowing that he would catch and hold. Then they just lay there, hearing Priscilla comi
ng in and beginning to make biscuits, so mundane, all these things that had been happening while they wandered in the desert, and each thought, silently, secretly, What was that? And there was no answer, there never was, so that in an hour they would be sitting at the breakfast table, dressed, calm, hardly looking at each other, taking part in the society of the house, Gibby and Lucius, Rose and Diana, sitting like normal people because they were normal people and the gymnastics of the night stayed in Diana’s bedroom, and in the thoughts of both of them, and the question What was that? What was that? separated the irrevocable from the rest as they talked about the war that was all they talked about anymore. France had fallen, London on fire, the fire and the noise coming every night, the people praying fervently as they lay in the dark, blackout trials everywhere, but Diana and Gibby knew something that nobody else knew: they had made love in the night, and, ephemeral as it was, it was also strong as steel and it could not be taken away, not even if they didn’t understand it, not even if the dirigible were floating over Saratoga and dropping bombs on the very house in which they sat. How were they to go on, knowing what they knew? How were their bodies to disengage? What was war to them, except some far-off fire and noise? Headlines in the morning paper, so similar every morning they became inseparable?
Diana looked up from her eggs, and there was Lucius, humble, insinuating Lucius. Why had he been brought here? Oh, yes. The library. But surely that work had been finished weeks ago? Surely his mission had been accomplished? Was she still paying him? She hardly knew.
“Lucius, darling,” she said. She didn’t want to have the conversation in front of everybody.
He whitened, but answered with his usual joviality, “Yes, my good madame?”
“I’d like to take a look at the library. I haven’t been in there in weeks. Can you give me a tour after breakfast?”
He whitened further. He hesitated and then said, “Well, of course. There are still some odds and ends to be done, but we can overlook those. I think you’ll be pleased.”