“We’re all one family, remember? In more ways than one, it seems. They could help you look after him… or I could. Help support him… financially, or… He’s their son, Dinny. And he didn’t die!”
“But he did. Their son did. Harry is not Henry. They’d take him away from everything he knows.”
“They have a right to know about him.” I shake my head, I cannot let this lie.
“So, what-you’re picturing Harry living with them, cooped up in a conventional life, or in some kind of institution, where they can visit him whenever they like and he’d be plonked in front of the TV the rest of the time?”
“It wouldn’t be like that!”
“How do you know?”
“I just… I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for them, all this time.” We are quiet for a long time. “I’m not going to decide anything without you,” I tell him.
“I’ve told you what I think,” Dinny says. “It would do them no good to see him now. And we don’t need any help.”
He shakes his head and looks sad. I cannot bear this thought, that I am making Dinny sad. I put my hand across the table, mesh my fingers into his.
“What you did for us-for Beth-taking the blame like that… it’s huge, Dinny. That was a huge thing that you did,” I say quietly. “Thank you.”
“Will you stay?” I ask him, late in the evening. He doesn’t answer, but he stands up, waits for me to lead. I won’t take him into Meredith’s room. I choose a guest room on the top floor, in the attics of the house, where the sheets are chilly with the long absence of warm bodies and the floorboards creak as we cross them. The silence makes us quiet, and the night outside the bare window sketches us in silvery grays as we undress. My skin rises where he touches me, the tiny hairs on me reaching out. He is so dark in this monochrome light, his face a depth of shadow I can’t fathom. I kiss his mouth, bruise my lips against his, drink him in. I want there to be no space between us, no part of my body not touching his. I want to wind myself around him like ivy, like a rope, binding us together. He has no tattoos, no piercings, no scars. He is whole, perfect. The palms of his hands are rough on my back. He coils one through my hair, tips my head back.
I close my eyes and watch with my body-each sure move of his hands, the warm brush of his breath, his weight over me. I pull his elbows out from under him. I want him to cover me, to crush me. Nothing guarded about him now, no hesitation, no thinking. A frown of a different kind as he puts his hands under my hips, lifts me, fits me to his body, pushes hard. I want to ink my mind with this, always keep him in this room with me; keep the taste of him on my tongue, make the beat between each second last, unending. Salt sweat on his top lip, ragged words mumbled into my hair. I want nothing else.
“I could stay with you,” I say afterwards. My eyes are shut, trusting. “I could stay and help you with Harry. I can get work anywhere. You shouldn’t have to support him alone. I could help. I could stay with you.”
“And travel all the time, and live like we do?”
“Well, why not? I’m homeless now, after all.”
“You’re a long way from being homeless. You don’t know what you’re saying.” His fingers are curled around my shoulder, and they smell of me. I lean myself against him. His skin is hot and dry beneath my cheek.
“I do know. I don’t want to go back to London, and I can’t stay here. I’m at your disposal,” I say, and the absurdity of this statement makes me chuckle. But Dinny does not laugh. There’s a growing tension in his frame that makes me uneasy. “I don’t mean… I’m not trying to foist myself on you, or anything,” I add hurriedly. No grip of mine could hold him, if he wanted to go. He sighs, turns his head to press a kiss onto my hair.
“It wouldn’t be so bad having you foisted on me, Pup,” he smiles. “Let’s sleep on it. We can sort it out tomorrow.” He says it so softly, so quietly that I decipher the words from the rumble in his chest beneath my ear. Deep and resolute. I am awake long enough to hear his breathing deepen, slow down, grow even. Then I sleep.
When I wake up I’m alone. The sky is flat, matt white, and a fine drizzle sifts down through the trees. A rook perches on a bare branch outside the window, feathers fluffed against the weather. Suddenly, I long for summer. For warmth, and dry ground, and a mile-wide sky. I run my hand across the side of the bed where Dinny was when I fell asleep. The sheets aren’t warm. There’s no indent in the pillow, no echo of his head. I could have imagined him here with me, but I didn’t. I didn’t. I won’t race down there. I won’t be alarmed. I make myself get dressed, eat breakfast cereal with the last of the milk. Today I will either have to shop or leave. I wonder which it will be.
I slip across the sodden lawn, wellies slick with water, papered with dead leaves. I feel clear-headed today, purposeful. It’s misplaced, perhaps, when I have not yet made the decisions that need making, but perhaps I am finally ready to make them, perhaps that’s what this feeling is. I’ve got a box of things for Harry. I found them in some drawers in the cellar, had earmarked them for the bin when I realized he might like them. A broken Sony radio, some old torches and batteries and bulbs and small metal objects of unknown provenance. They rattle against the cardboard under my arm. My back aches from the strain of Dinny’s weight, pushing against my pelvis. I shiver, cradle this physical memory close to me.
I stand for quite some time in the center of the camp clearing, while the rain begins to soften the box I carry. No vans here now, no dogs, no columns of smoke. It is deserted and I am left behind-alone in an empty clearing churned muddy by feet and wheels; and me, churned muddy by him. By the getting of him, and now the losing. My long-lost cousin, my childhood hero. My Dinny. Perfect calm, and stillness. No breath of a breeze today. I can hear a car, speeding along the lane from the village, tires crackling in the standing rainwater. I have no phone number for him, no email address, no clue in which direction he has gone. I turn in a slow circle, in case there is something behind me, something that waited for me, or someone.
Legacy
1911-
Caroline’s last child was born in 1911, long after the occupants of Storton Manor had given up hope of there being a Calcott heir. There had been other pregnancies, two of them, both a long time in the conceiving, but Caroline’s body had rejected the children and they had been lost before they even really began. The little girl was born in August. It was a long, hot summer the likes of which no one could remember, and Caroline sweltered, shuffling into the garden to lie swollen and prone in the shade, drowsing. The heat was such that sometimes, as she hovered on the edges of sleep, she imagined herself back in Woodward County, sitting on the porch and gazing out at the yard, waiting for Corin to ride home; so that when she was approached by a servant or her husband, she stared at them in no little confusion for a while, before remembering who they were and where she was.
The gardens were scorched and brown. A village boy, Tommy Westenfell, drowned in the dew pond. His feet got tangled in weeds at the bottom and he was found hours later by his distraught father; pale, still, and sleepy-eyed. Mrs. Priddy took a bad turn walking back from the butcher with a whole leg of lamb and was consigned to her bed for three days, her skin mottled and puce. Estelle and Liz, Cass’s plump replacement, worked hard to cover for her, with perspiration soaking their uniforms. The smell everywhere was of parched earth, sweat and hot, dry air. The stone flags of the terrace burnt Caroline’s feet through the soles of her slippers. Henry Calcott, who was by then uncomfortable around his own wife, remained at home long enough to see the child safely born, and then quit Wiltshire to stay with friends by the sea in Bournemouth.