And now? Now, despite the change of domestic interiors, and the chance of a fresh start together, it seemed that events conspired to remind her again of Frank.
It wasn’t just the gossip of the neighbours that brought him to mind. One day, when she was alone in the house, and unpacking various personal belongings, she came across several wallets of Rory’s photographs. Many were relatively recent pictures of the two of them together in Athens and Malta. But buried amongst the transparent smiles were some pictures she couldn’t remember ever having seen before (had Rory kept them from her?); family portraits that went back decades. A photograph of his parents on their wedding day; the black and white image eroded over the years to a series of greys. Pictures of christenings, in which proud godparents cradled babies smothered in the family lace.
And then, photographs of the brothers together; as toddlers, with wide eyes; as surly schoolchildren, snapped at gymnastic displays and in school pageants. Then, as the shyness of acne-ridden adolescence took over, the number of pictures dwindled – until the frogs emerged, as princes, the other side of puberty.
Seeing Frank in brilliant colour, clowning for the camera, she felt herself blushing. He had been an exhibitionist youth, predictably enough; always dressed à la mode. Rory, by comparison, looked dowdy. It seemed to her that the brothers’ future lives were sketched in these early portraits. Frank the smiling, seductive chameleon; Rory the solid citizen.
She had packed the pictures away at last, and found, when she stood up, that with the blushes had come tears. Not of regret. She had no use for that. It was fury which made her eyes sting. Somehow, between one breath and the next, she’d lost herself.
She knew too, with perfect certainty, when her grip had first faltered. Lying on a bed of wedding lace, while Frank beset her neck with kisses.
3
Once in a while she went up to the room with the sealed blinds.
So far, they’d done little decorating work on the upper floors, preferring to first organize the areas in public gaze. The room had therefore remained untouched. Unentered, indeed, except for these few visits of hers.
She wasn’t sure why she went up; nor how to account for the odd assortment of feelings that beset her while there. But there was something about the dark interior which gave her comfort: it was a womb of sorts; a dead woman’s womb. Sometimes, when Rory was at work, she simply took herself up the stairs and sat in the stillness thinking of nothing; or at least nothing she could put words to.
These sojourns made her feel oddly guilty, and she tried to stay away from the room when Rory was around. But it wasn’t always possible. Sometimes her feet took her there without instructions so to do.
It happened thus that Saturday, the day of the blood.
She had been watching Rory at work on the kitchen door, chiselling several layers of paint around the hinges, when she seemed to hear the room call. Satisfied that he was thoroughly engrossed in his chores, she went upstairs.
It was cooler than usual, and she was glad of it.
She put her hand to the wall, and then transferred her chilled palm to her forehead.
‘No use,’ she murmured to herself, picturing the man at work downstairs. She didn’t love him; no more than he, beneath his infatuation with her face, loved her. He chiselled in a world of his own; she suffered here, far removed from him.
A gust of wind caught the back door below. She heard it slam.
Downstairs, the sound made Rory lose his concentration. The chisel jumped its groove and sliced deeply into the thumb of his left hand. He shouted, as a gush of colour came. The chisel hit the floor.
‘Hell and damnation!’
She heard, but did nothing. Too late, she surfaced through a stupor of melancholy to realize that he was coming upstairs. Fumbling for the key, and an excuse to justify her presence in the room, she stood up, but he was already at the door, crossing the threshold, rushing towards her, his right hand clamped ineptly around his left. Blood was coming in abundance. It welled up between his fingers and dribbled down his arm, dripping from his elbow, adding stain to stain on the bare boards.
‘What have you done?’ she asked him.
‘What does it look like?’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Cut myself.’
His face and neck had gone the colour of window-putty. She’d seen him like this before, he had on occasion passed out at the sight of his own blood.
‘Do something,’ he said queasily.
‘Is it deep?’
‘I don’t know!’ he yelled at her. ‘I don’t want to look.’
He was ridiculous, she thought; but this wasn’t the time to give vent to the contempt she felt. Instead she took his bloody hand in hers and, while he looked away, prised the palm from the cut. It was sizeable, and still bleeding profusely. Deep blood; dark blood.
‘I think we’d better take you off to the hospital,’ she told him.
‘Can you cover it up?’ he asked, his voice devoid of anger now.
‘Sure. I’ll get a clean binding. Come on – ’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his ashen face. ‘If I take a step, I think I’ll pass out.’
‘Stay here then,’ she soothed him. ‘You’ll be fine.’
Finding no bandages in the bathroom cabinet the equal of the staunching, she fetched a few clean handkerchiefs from his drawer and went back into the room. He was leaning against the wall now, his skin glossy with sweat. He had padded in the blood he’d shed; she could taste the tang of it in the air.
Still quietly reassuring him that he wouldn’t die of a two-inch cut, she wound a handkerchief around his hand, bound it on with a second, then escorted him, trembling like a leaf, down the stairs (one by one, like a child) and out to the car.
At the hospital they waited an hour in a queue of the walking wounded before he was finally seen and stitched up. It was difficult for her to know in retrospect what was more comical about the episode: his weakness, or the extravagance of his subsequent gratitude. She told him, when he became too fulsome, that she didn’t want thanks from him, and it was true.
She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.
4
‘Did you clean up the floor in the damp room?’ she asked him the following day. They’d called it the damp room since that first Sunday, though there was not a sign of rot from ceiling to skirting board.
Rory looked up from his magazine. Grey moons hung beneath his eyes. He hadn’t slept well, so he’d said. A cut finger, and he had nightmares of mortality. She, on the other hand, had slept like a babe.
‘What did you say?’ he asked her.
‘The floor,’ she said again. ‘There was blood on the floor. You cleaned it up.’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said simply, and returned to the magazine.
‘Well I didn’t,’ she said.
He offered her an indulgent smile. ‘You’re such a perfect hausfrau,’ he said. ‘You don’t even know when you’re doing it.’
The subject was closed there. He was content, apparently, to believe that she was quietly losing her sanity.
She, on the other hand, had the strangest sense that she was about to find it again.