It has been a hellish summer, uncomfortably hot, pollen and carbon monoxide and recrimination hanging in the air. But finally, finally, J and I have struck a deal. We go our separate ways, he moves in with Celia, and we sell the house. He gets three-quarters of the proceeds, I get the rest, but I get my money up front so that I can put in a bid for the island.
Celia has signed off on all of this—it’ll be her money, after all.
My heart breaks, but I hardly feel it, because the rest of me vibrates with joy.
I will be free.
Becker is reading when Helena walks into the study. It is early, barely light, wet flakes of snow falling but not sticking. He doesn’t turn around to look at her but allows himself the anticipation of the feel of her hands resting soft on his shoulders and then the warmth of her lips on his neck.
“Hello.” Her morning breath is sugary sweet. She perches on the edge of his desk, burgundy robe loosely belted across her bump, her hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea. “How is she, your Vanessa?”
He pulls a face. “Strange,” he says, and he reads her the paragraph he has just finished. “She loves him and she longs to be free of him, she vibrates with joy at the thought of leaving him. She’s a riddle.”
Helena shrugs. “Not at all,” she says. Becker raises his eyebrows at her, and she laughs, lifting a foot and placing it in his lap. He obliges her by massaging her sole. “You can love someone with your whole heart and be desperate to be rid of them. Some people are just—” She breaks off, exhaling softly over the surface of her tea. “Hard to be around, no matter how much you adore them. And Julian was awful to her, wasn’t he? Notoriously so. Selling her work to pay off his debts, sleeping around. That affair with Celia Gray was so public, so humiliating. She must have hated him for that.”
“But that’s just it—she didn’t hate him,” Becker replies. “She loved him. Her heart breaks; she says so here.”
“But that’s just her heart, isn’t it?” She smiles at him. “What about the rest of her?” She bites her lip, sliding her foot gently up his thigh. “Hearts can be overridden, other parts maybe not so much.”
He laughs breathlessly as he reaches for her.
Sex between them lately is intense, verging on brutal. He means to show reverence and respect for her condition, but in the moment he always forgets, and his satisfaction gives way—almost as soon as he’s come—to guilt. This dissolving of boundaries between their bodies, between his self and hers, is a source of joy, but it’s complicated now by something else. Someone else.
Afterward he struggles to look her in the eyes and she shoves him so hard that he smacks his head on the foot of the desk. He gets to his knees, rubbing the back of his head. “What was that for?” As if he doesn’t know.
“Don’t Madonna-whore me, James,” she says sternly, pulling her robe back around her. She allows him to help her to her feet, but the second she’s upright, she snatches her hand from his. “I invited Sebastian for supper,” she says, flinging the words out casually, like someone skimming stones across a lake. “Can you make sure we’ve got some good wine? Not Tesco Finest.”
A delivery van is parked at the back entrance of the big house, which means they’re receiving a new piece. Since no one has informed Becker about this, he imagines it’s something either very old or very new. Four men—two in the van itself and two on the ground—are offloading what appears to be an enormous carpet. Becker steps in to support the central section, and they carry it in together.
Sebastian and his mother are waiting in the central hall, their faces lit with anticipation. Lady Emmeline’s mouth twists in distaste when she spies Becker. She shoots him a look to freeze the blood and then turns to her son. “Let me know when it’s in place,” she says. She walks off in the direction of the drawing room, heels clicking briskly on the parquet.
“Morning, Emmeline!” Becker calls out loudly to her retreating back.
Sebastian shakes his head. “At least give her her due, for Christ’s sake.”
Becker eyeballs Sebastian. “It really doesn’t matter how I address her, does it? I’ll always be the filthy, working-class interloper.”
“You’ll always be the man who broke up her son’s engagement,” Sebastian says, not quite under his breath. He turns to the deliverymen. “We’re putting it in the blue room,” he says brightly, extending his right arm like a tour guide. “It’s this way, I’ll show you.”
In his office, Becker scrolls news sites, headlines rolling past unread as quietly he chastises himself. Why did he say that? There was no call for him to be spiteful.
There was an argument not long after he’d first arrived at Fairburn, over the placement of a sculpture—an unforgivably ugly sculpture—that Sebastian had bought, and for some reason he can’t quite remember now, Becker allowed it to get heated: he raised his voice, used bad language. Later, when he was sitting on the steps to the east lawn, smoking a cigarette, feeling foolish, Helena came to find him. Oh, here we go, he thought, the posh girl with a trust fund and a 2.2 in art history has come to tell me off, to teach me how to behave.
But she didn’t. She asked him to roll her a cigarette and, while he did so, offered a word of advice. Don’t let them ruffle your feathers, she said. Don’t let them get under your skin. You’re too passionate. He remembers how he blushed when she said that, how he stiffened. These people have ice in their veins, she told him. Don’t show your hand. Don’t let them see so easily who you are.
He’s annoyed that he didn’t follow her advice this morning, but annoyed as he is at himself, he is angry with Sebastian, too—irrationally so. He doesn’t want to be reminded of all the wrongs he, Becker, has done to his employer.
He’s still smarting when, an hour or so later, Sebastian puts his head round the door. “Beck. Do you want to come and see the Aubusson in situ?”
Dutifully and in silence, Becker follows Sebastian along the hall to the blue room, so-named for its curtains, in which they have laid in the center an antique Aubusson rug in shades of blue and cream.
It is not at all to Becker’s taste. “It’s very fine,” he says.
“Isn’t it?”
Becker nods, pressing his lips together firmly. “Very fine. Where did you get it? You didn’t tell me you were looking for one.”
Sebastian crouches down, brushing the back of his hand against the wool. “Mother got it, at auction. Without telling me,” he says, rising back to his full height. He gives Becker a knowing look, and they both smile. “I’m sorry about earlier,” he says.
“Not at all, I was . . . a dick.”
“You were.” Sebastian laughs, slapping him on the shoulder. “But even so. It’s not just about Hels.” He turns away, and Becker follows, heading back down the hallway toward Becker’s office. “Mother not liking you, I mean. There’s more to it than that.”
“I know,” Becker says.
“It’s not just because you’re a filthy, working-class interloper,” Sebastian says, chuckling. “You know it’s complicated. It’s about my father, and Vanessa, and you being . . . well, a constant reminder of Vanessa, and all that went on—”
“But you know Vanessa’s work would be here with or without me.”
“It would, of course. But you’re sort of . . . the embodiment of some pretty negative associations for her.” He shrugs. “Ah, look—she’s been in a foul mood since she saw the doctor last week anyway.”
They’ve reached his office door. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?” Becker asks. He’s ashamed to realize how much the idea of Lady Emmeline being unwell pleases him.
Sebastian scoffs, shakes his head. “Lady Em will outlive us all,” he says. “The doc’s told her that the reason she’s not sleeping and feeling so . . . antsy all the time is that she might have post-traumatic stress disorder, of all things. As you can imagine, she’s not best pleased about that.” He walks before Becker into the office, strolling across to the window behind the desk. The snow is still falling; it’s heavier now, stickier. “To be fair, they do say it about pretty much everyone these days, don’t they? PTSD, I mean. Used to be you had to have been blown up by terrorists or pinned down under enemy fire. Nowadays all you need to do is hit the family cat with your car.” He turns, smiling ruefully at Becker, who nods and looks away. “I know what you’re thinking: Ah, but she didn’t run over a cat, she accidentally shot her husband in the neck and he bled out in front of her. I know.” Becker never ceases to be astounded by the stiffness of Sebastian’s upper lip in the face of this—and other—misfortunes. “I know, you know, but the doctor doesn’t. He got the official line, like the police and the press and everyone else, which was probably a mistake. I think we could probably have counted on the doc to be discreet . . .” Sebastian smiles, shaking his head. “That’s just the way it went.”
The way it went was that Mr. Bryant, the gamekeeper, who is not much younger than Sebastian’s mother and has worked for her family since he was a teenager, claimed that the stray shot came from his gun, sparing Lady Emmeline the ordeal of a police investigation and all the press intrusion that would go with it. There was an investigation, which cleared Bryant of any wrongdoing—the fault, if there were any, lay with Douglas himself, who had walked ahead of the guns and put himself in harm’s way—and he retired a few months later. Quite possibly, Becker thinks, with a rather more generous pension than he might have been expecting.
“I’m sorry, Seb,” Becker says. “I forget sometimes just how much it is you’re dealing with.”
Sebastian scoffs. “A bunch of octogenarians running around with high-powered rifles, what could possibly go wrong?” His smile has become strained. “They had no business going out there, any of them, but what can you do? Imagine me trying to get in Emmeline’s way.”
Becker steers the conversation toward the mundane—an auction Sebastian is planning to attend in Edinburgh, the house tours they are considering launching next spring, for which Seb has managed to rustle up a little publicity.
“I persuaded the Sunday Times journo to ping over her copy just to make sure there are no literals. I’m going to email it to you—you’ll give it the once-over, won’t you?”
“Sure,” Becker says. “Any good?”
Sebastian rocks his head side to side. “She’ll not win a Pulitzer.”