Chapter 35: Rupert - The Golden Hours

He would say late at night was worst, but actually it was all awful. Awful to parade around keeping up appearances for Zoë, and Georgie, for the students, getting his words wrong, dropping things, no memory. Awful during the long nights when he couldn’t, just couldn’t, sleep, and would leave Zoë’s bed knowing she was awake, going to stare out the front at the cold river, out the back at the distant moon, out the side at the shadowed alley, out the other side at the cars parked beyond the neighbour’s garden. And it was awful that it didn’t seem to be fading. The problem, of course, was that there was absolutely nobody he could talk to about this. Most people didn’t know Michèle ever existed, so how could he ask them to mourn her death? His children who he had already damaged so much by being with her in the first place? Zoë?

Well.

After all the pain and grief and learning and the long, slow, mutual rapprochement they had managed when he’d finally come back after the war; after the bittersweet confessions, the acknowledgements, and finally reunion in a love more real, more adult, than either of them had even imagined? No. That had taken years, and hard, hard work. He could not ask more of her. This, he must carry silently to his grave. He heard his mother’s voice: Oh no, my dear, you mustn’t burden them – your responsibility now is to bear that experience.

And that meant the other sorrow must be carried silently, too. Nobody had told him that when death takes somebody you love, it brings back in its coat tails the other people you love, those it has already taken. All that old pain suddenly leaps to life again, fresh as a daisy, in cahoots with the new grief, to tear you to bits, leave you shattered and restless and obsessed. There, hand in hand with the ghost of Michèle, was the ghost of Isobel. The two women – and how lucky he was to have a third – who loved him! He knew that. But what you know and what you feel don’t always match up. There was no point his head telling him that he hadn’t seen either of those women for decades, that they were the past, and the past was over. His heart held on, and was giving him hell. How he had failed them: failed Isobel by not saving her, by getting her pregnant in the first place – yes, he knew perfectly well this was illogical. Failed Michèle by leaving her, alone with their baby in that traumatised village, never going back, never sending money, believing her convenient brave declaration that she needed nothing from him. And failed his daughter, who must be a young woman now, as lovely and deserving of love as Clary or Juliet, as needy and difficult as Neville – who knew? She might be either, or both, or any combination. Was it her who had picked the pink roses? Michèle’s surname on the grave was her maiden name. No husband had rescued or protected them.

He didn’t know, and that was the killing thing of it. And there she was, over there, alone, his flesh and blood, orphaned. Though with her father living.

Or she might be dead too! And he would never know. He desperately wanted to go back and find her.

‘Darling?’ Zoë called tentatively, down the stairs of the now empty-seeming house. Leaning against the window in what was, at least, the drawing room again, he heard her voice and took a hard pull on his cigarette. He was failing Zoë, too. It was like an octopus, wrapped and clinging round his brain, suffocating his thoughts. God, if he could talk to Archie . . . Archie who had seen him through Isobel’s death, who had taken him for long walks and stuffed him with stew till he’d felt like a huge beloved dog, who had understood about Zoë . . . but no. He’d made up his mind. Clary didn’t know any of this, and it would be absolutely unfair to unload on Archie and expect him not to say anything to Clary. The idea of Clary ever knowing clawed his heart.

The idea of talking to Neville sometimes brushed through the back of his mind, and away again. Neville was just not capable, really. Rupert knew he had done his best for both his children when they were small – the nights telling stories to keep Neville’s mind off his asthma, juggling their bottomless hunger for love – but he had been so damaged himself, and then so desperate to make things work with Zoë . . . No, he had failed them, too. He recalled bleakly and uselessly how the adults had reassured each other: Neville is too young to know, Clary is so young she will get over it, children get over things. Now, he pictured the Duchy. Would he have ‘got over it’, if he had never known her, or lost her when he was five? But that was how we thought. We all thought that. And Clary never mentioned her mother, after she died! At least to him. So she must have been fine. And he hadn’t mentioned Isobel either – except to Archie. And had he been fine?

He laughed. And look at me now, he thought. Not mentioning Michèle. Not telling anybody anything. A phrase of Clary’s came back to him: Not telling is not loving. His mother’s advice clearly wasn’t working. But Clary’s was unworkable. And anyway, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The war had stopped anybody having any choice about anything. They had been motherless children. And now so was his daughter in France. He didn’t even know her name.

‘Darling?’ It came with the rising curve, the note of anxiety.

Obediently, he went to the landing and called back: ‘Just coming, my love.’ She was going to look at him, pleading with her beautiful eyes, and he was going to fail her again. It was a punishment he deserved. But she didn’t.

Round and round in his mind the same harsh boots marched the same unforgiving circles.

‘Just – just –’ he called, but there was nothing he could tell her. He wasn’t doing anything. In the end he went and got two glasses of water, though they both customarily had glasses of water by their bedsides anyway, and creaked back up to the bedroom. She was sitting on the side of the bed, desolate and monochrome in the dim light.

‘It’s nearly four,’ she said, and he smiled, docile, and said, ‘Yes!’, went to sit on the other side, then stood up again.

‘Darling,’ she said, and he said, ‘You go back to sleep. Sorry, I just –’ And he went back out again.

* * *

Zoë sat and heard him: up the stairs, down the stairs. Up the stairs again. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Got up, straightened the wrinkled sheets, seamy from all the tossing and turning. Lay back down. Stared.