Not Quite a Husband (28 page)

“Are you going to leave again soon?” asked Callista.

“I don’t have plans yet,” Bryony answered, moving away from her father’s bed.

“And Leo, is he coming back too?”

“Yes, he means to settle in Cambridge.”

Nearly a month had passed since she kissed him good-bye, a separation that was already longer than the time they’d spent together in India and growing lengthier by the day. She’d had no news from him. She inferred that he was safe, that if something had happened then she would have heard of it. But still she fretted.

And not just about his safety.

He had not wanted a future with her. He’d doubted her capacity to love. In the heat of battle, with their lives on the line, it had not mattered. Death, whatever its faults, simplified life as nothing else did. But with the likelihood of decades upon decades of time before them, would not the potent intimacy that had shielded them from past wounds eventually lose its power and strength against the sheer monotony and ordinariness of daily life, against everything else that had held them apart?

She lifted a panel of the heavy curtain and looked down into the glistening street below. In India, the rain, when it came, was heavy and decisive. She’d forgotten how dithering and miserly English rain
could be—a whole day of mist and drizzle and the actual precipitation might barely cover the bottom of a bucket.

And she’d forgotten how cool it was, fires lit at the very end of August, and still she felt the damp chill rising from the floorboards.

“Bryony,” Callista called her name.

She turned around slowly.

“I’m sorry,” said Callista. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

Occasionally Bryony had nightmares, swords and darkness and Leo bleeding from a thousand cuts. She’d jerk awake, gasping, and not be able to go back to sleep for hours, her heart quaking with the knowledge of how close they’d come.

Times like that she’d get quite angry with Callista, for her reckless fabrications. Leo could have died from the Pathans’ swords or been shot and felled, like that less fortunate sepoy standing next to him.

It was always easier to blame someone else.

She walked to the far side of the bed, where Callista stood with her back against the wall. She took Callista’s hands in hers, touching her sister for the first time in years, perhaps decades.

“It’s all right,” she said.

Three common words, a common phrase, as ordinary as sparrows and moths. Yet, as the syllables left her lips, they felt like jewels, round and brilliant. And her heart was somehow more whole, more spacious.

She returned to her father’s side, and sat down on the chair that had been placed by the bed. Only one lamp had been lit, but its light, the color of faded brass, caught every wrinkle and sag on Geoffrey Asquith’s face. When had he become so old?

“You have changed,” said Callista.

Bryony raised her head.

“When I was small, it was difficult for me to be around you,” Callista continued. “All your emotions were so intense—your anger like daggers, your unhappiness a poisoned well. Even your love had such sharp corners and dark alleys.

“Then there were years when I thought you were sleepwalking through life, drugged with work, the way people who take too much laudanum feel nothing. But when you became engaged to Leo, the magnitude of your happiness frightened me. It felt like an overloaded apple cart—the least bump in the road might upset the whole thing.”

Bryony almost chuckled at her description. It was quite apt, really, a cart overloaded with apples, a
heart overloaded with hopes, both equally prone to overturning.

Callista smiled. “I guess what I’m really trying to say is that you used to shatter easily. But now you’ve become less brittle.”

Bryony brought her hands to rest on the edge of the bed—the sheets were French, as fine and soft as spun cloud. In a way, Leo had been right. She’d shattered too easily because she hadn’t known how to love anyone less perfect, thoughtful, and devoted than Toddy. But now, she thought, she was learning.

“I hope so,” she said.

Callista went to bed at eleven o’clock. Bryony remained by her father’s side. A quarter hour later there were footsteps in the hall. She thought it was Callista coming back, but it was her stepmother.

Mrs. Asquith was in her mid-fifties, with the kind of finely wrought features that would still be finely wrought when she reached her seventies. She touched her husband’s forehead and briefly fussed with the counterpane. They were perfect strangers, Bryony and Mrs. Asquith, even though Mrs. Asquith had been married to Geoffrey Asquith for twenty-four years.

By the time she came to live with Bryony and
Callista, she had been worn down by her sons’ long years of illness and was herself in imperfect health. She had not made very many overtures to win over Bryony’s affection. Bryony, with the memory of the execrable governess that had been Mrs. Asquith’s hire very much fresh on her mind, had freely ignored Mrs. Asquith.

That distance, once established, took on its own air of immutability. Like a piece of furniture that pleased no one, yet offended no one enough to remove, it remained in place, year after year.

Mrs. Asquith straightened. She placed a thin hand against a bedpost and gazed down at her dying husband. She looked much older than Bryony remembered.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Bryony asked.

“I’ll be fine in time,” said Mrs. Asquith. She lifted her eyes and looked at Bryony. “I don’t know whether I shall see much of you after your father—I don’t know how much I shall see of you in the future, so I thought I would speak to you now.

“I understood very well at the time your father proposed to me that he needed a mother for his children and I was prepared to assume that responsibility. But then both Paul’s and Angus’s health failed—”

She exhaled. “What I mean to say is that I did very
poorly by you and your sister in those years, but especially by you. I have no defense except to say that as my sons suffered and deteriorated, it seemed to me that you and Callista were blessed with everything children could ask for: good, robust health. By the time I realized the mistake in my assumption, years had passed and—and I was never there. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t have been everywhere at once, ma’am. You must not blame yourself for attending to Paul and Angus when they needed you.”

“Yes, but you and Callista needed me too.”

Bryony looked down at her father’s inert figure. “We have a father, ma’am. He could have bestirred himself a little more when you had to be away.”

“Yes, he could have. He should have,” agreed Mrs. Asquith. “However, it did not occur to me to point out his failings to him, because I was so grateful that he did not take me to task for what
I
had failed to do.”

She paused. “There was another occasion, however, when I did point out his failing to him. That was when he debated whether to allow you to go to medical school. I was adamantly against the idea. I thought—I’m sorry—I thought you were being headstrong and needlessly rebellious and I was aghast that he even gave the idea due consideration. I believed
it would ruin your chance at a suitable marriage and reduce the prestige of the Asquith name all at once.

“He agonized over it. But in the end he said to me that he had not the moral authority to forbid you to go. That since he had given you so little in life, he owed you the freedom to choose your own path.”

Mrs. Asquith bent and kissed her husband on the forehead. She did the same with Bryony.

“I thought you should know that,” said Mrs. Asquith, before she left quietly in a swirl of trailing robes and lilac powder.

Bryony thought she dreamed that someone was squeezing her hand. But as she lifted her head from the bed and blinked at the unfamiliar surroundings, her hand was again squeezed.

“Father!”

Geoffrey Asquith looked no different. His eyes remained stubbornly closed, his mouth disconcertingly slack on the side away from Bryony. She flung aside the counterpane and watched his hand.

“Can you hear me, Father? It’s Bryony.”

This time she saw it. His fingers, closing around hers.

Her eyes filled with inexplicable tears. “I’m back. I came back from India.”

He squeezed again, so she kept on talking. “It was quite an adventure. Mr. Marsden traveled a thousand miles to find me, so that I could come home to see you. Yes, that Mr. Marsden, the one who used to be your son-in-law. I would have arrived sooner, but Mr. Marsden suffered a malarial attack. And then we found ourselves in the middle of an actual war on the Indian frontier. But we are safe and I’m here now.”

She raised his hand and held in tight. “Mr. Marsden is a staunch defender of yours, even though you once boxed him senseless over me—or perhaps because you once boxed him senseless over me. He likes your books. And he says that you love me.”

Her father squeezed her hand hard. It was the strongest squeeze yet. She interlaced their fingers and rested the back of his hand against her cheek.

“I don’t suppose”—she was suddenly choking a little. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever thanked you for letting me go to medical school. Or for marrying Toddy—she was wonderful.”

She touched her other hand to his bearded jaw. “Do you remember the summer when I was six? You came with Toddy and me on our walks a few times.
One time we went to the village. And you bought me a box of toffee. Another time we picked wild strawberries together and had them with fresh cream at home.”

He squeezed her hand again, but it was a weaker squeeze.

“I don’t think you cared for wild strawberries,” she raised her voice, as if trying to make herself heard to someone who was moving further and further away. “But Toddy kept giving you looks, so you ate them anyway, because I picked them and I loved them.”

The squeeze, when it came, was even more anemic. He was fading away. Something fierce gripped her heart. “I love you.”

To that, Geoffrey Asquith gave one final squeeze.

She sat for a long time, his hand held in her lap. But he did not exhibit any more signs of consciousness.

At dawn, when she woke up again, he had already passed away.

The house plunged into mourning. All the window blinds were pulled down—they would remain down until Geoffrey Asquith’s body departed the house on the day of his funeral. Black crape was draped
over the front door. Mourning clothes arrived by the boxful, in crape for Mrs. Asquith, in paramatta silk for Bryony and Callista.

As grieving family members were not expected to worry about funeral arrangements, her father’s closest friends took care of them. Friends and acquaintances respected the privacy of the bereaved by not visiting, but Mrs. Asquith’s relations did call on her to offer their condolences.

In their black dresses, Bryony and Callista worked in the study, sorting their father’s papers. They were knee-deep in old invitations, cards, correspondences—her father had never thrown away anything addressed to him, it would seem. There were also boxes of manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and scraps of paper with various hastily scribbled fragments of thoughts on everything from Donne’s wit to Johnson’s hygiene.