Arthur wondered about the marriages whose first beginnings he now drew from the wooden chest and skimmed over between his thumbs. Were they all as happy as his had been, when he saw his bride at the altar, when he exchanged a wink with his crying mother in the audience? What would these passions become in a decade and a half?
Love grew docile with age, like a faithful hound. It became precious and prized, locked away from the world like a jewelry box. Love grew commendably dependable-love was eggs, love was ham, love was the morning paper. He loved Touie as much as he ever had. No. More. He would always love Touie. Yes, since she’d gotten sick, those years ago, they’d refrained from certain intimacies. They would have no more children-but still Arthur could not be happier with his family. He felt as if he’d grown up with Touie, even though he’d been twenty-six when he met her, and she’d been twenty-eight-as if he’d become a grown man right beside her. As if she were the dear sister from whom he kept no secrets.
Well, perhaps one secret. There was Jean…
Three years earlier, he’d met the beautiful and brilliant Jean Leckie, and he’d been clocked clean across the jaw by the sparkle of her conversation, by her immodest wit, by the radiant flourishes of her batting eyelashes. She was young, but she was so wise, so unafraid to think and wonder and express herself as if she were a man. Arthur had never met a woman like her, and he felt quite certain that he never would again. Of course he remained completely pure in his intentions toward her. Their hands would never even touch. He stretched out his chest when he walked beside her, holding his arms behind his back at ninety-degree angles at the elbows. He had taken an oath, the same oath written on the hundreds of papers that lay across his lap at this moment. He would never betray it. But he would continue to see Jean, as much as he honorably could. He would take long walks through the countryside with her. She would cheer him from the stands at his cricket matches.
This, too, was love. And to Arthur’s great surprise, the two loves did not exclude one another. He loved Touie all the more for his loving Jean. He loved them so differently that they magnified one another, that they reflected mirror opposite images of the divine into his bulging heart. He thought that he might pop, sometimes, from the gallons of love that poured into his middle-aged body. The oil and water of separate affections did not mix, but they also did not detonate. They coursed separately and equally through his bloodstream.
How much love could one man store in himself? Did he love more than the fresh-faced grooms who affixed their bachelor names to these allegations? Did he love more than the radiant brides who blushed all the colors of a June rose garden at the thought of becoming the new Mrs. What-Have-You? Did all loves look the same, like plucked and boiled chickens? Or were they different, like corneas, fingerprints, crania?
Arthur thought about the love that had died within the breast of Morgan Nemain. The love that was strangled naked in a filthy Stepney bathtub and left to rot. She had not been dead very long when the boardinghouse proprietor had found her. Her belly might still have been warm to the touch. Her heart had not yet sprouted tiny whitepetal maggots.
Arthur furiously flicked through the allegations for some glimpse of the man who had done this. He scanned the pages for revenge.
Sometime later the friar returned. Arthur did not hear him enter, so engrossed was he in his search for names. The boy tapped Arthur on the shoulder to get his attention, and Arthur jumped up, startled. He held his hand to his chest and took a series of deep breaths.
“My apologies, sir!” said the friar. “I had no intention of startling you!”
“Quite all right,” huffed Arthur. “I had no intention of being startled.”
“How goes your digging?”
“Not well, I fear,” admitted Arthur. “I’ve found no one with the name Morgan Nemain mentioned in any of these documents. She-my daughter-she probably gave a false name.”
The friar nodded knowingly.
“I’m rather hard up for clues.” Arthur had an offhand thought, and he continued with a smile, “You must see so many young men come and go through your doors… You wouldn’t happen to remember the name, or the face, of a fellow with a high whine of a voice. He would have been here two weeks ago Tuesday. Black cloak. Black top hat.” Arthur laughed-would there be any way in which he might be less specific in his description?
The friar made a face as if he’d just tasted sour milk. He stared at Arthur curiously.
“Funny, sir… I think the man you’re looking for asked me the very same question.”
Now it was Arthur’s turn to make an odd face.
“Pardon me?” he said.
“Your fellow. The groom. It was the strangest thing. A man comes in, tight, high little voice, black-on-black clothes, two weeks or so past, like you said. Wouldn’t have thought twice about it myself, of course, except that I felt I recognized him. And he saw that I did, and asked me whether I did, and I said yes. I did, and he said I couldn’t have, that didn’t make sense, and I agreed, and that was that.”
“I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“I recognized the gent because he’d come in before. Some months back. He’d filled out an allegation, and he’d gone off to be married. Then, a few weeks ago, a fellow comes in looks just the same. I smelled, what, déjà vu, yes? That’s what the French say? I wouldn’t have remembered him, except I get this funny feeling in my gut that I’ve seen him before. I ask him if I have, and he gets just terribly nervous.
“ ‘From when do you think you’d be recognizing me?’ he says.
“ ‘ I hardly know,’ I say. And I have a laugh, jesting with the man. ‘Have you ever been married before?’ I’m kidding, of course-he was young, not yet thirty, how would he have been? But he becomes frightfully agitated. Flops his arms around like he’s a marionette.
“ ‘I am quite certain, my good friar,’ he says to me, ‘I am quite certain that I haven’t the faintest idea to what you might be referring.’ His voice gets so high it’s like he’s playing a William Byrd. Then he goes into it, gives me quite a talking-to. He uses some language which I don’t fancy hearing under this roof, you understand? I would have taken umbrage and caused a stir, for my part, but I am in the service of the Lord. I turn the other cheek. He produces his allegation, I sign in my place at the bottom, and he goes on his way.”
As Arthur listened to the friar’s monologue, he felt a prickly sensation along his spine and a widening of his brow. He felt the intoxicating tingle of discovery.
“Do you recall what name the young man gave?” asked Arthur, leaning forward onto the tips of his toes toward the friar.
The friar looked down. “I don’t, sir, I’m sorry to say.”
Arthur’s mind whirled around like a top, spinning in circles, running through possibilities. “But you say you think he’d been married before?” he asked.
“Well, I hardly thought it too likely at the time, except for the man’s surliness,” said the friar. “But now… Do you think it’s so?”
“I think,” Arthur wanted to say but could not, “that whatever this man did to Morgan Nemain he did to another girl first.”
CHAPTER 16 The Answering Machine