“Am I to be your Lady Macdonald?” The thought is out before she can suppress it.
Wilfrid hesitates. “Perhaps the wrong analogy, but you see my point—Ottawa needs you. My goodness, Canada needs you. . . .”
He settles back, and they regard each other with a flash of the old humour and avidity. At last they’re rediscovering their special rapport and intimacy, their unique ability to poke fun without malice, to take unbounded pleasure in each other.
Wilfrid rises and goes to the hall table, returning with the parcel. He resumes his seat beside her. “I thought I’d bring these to you.”
“My goodness. What are they?”
“Letters.” He places the parcel between her hands, and she feels the weight of it, heavy as stone.
“My letters? All of them?”
“From all down the years. That’s why I’ve been rereading them. I wanted to revisit you through your words, savour all their nuances—”
“Before getting rid of them.”
“Before returning them to you for safekeeping. What you do with them, my dear, is your prerogative. You wrote them.”
Émilie feels bewildered, frightened, unspeakably wounded. “Is that what you want? An auto-da-fé?”
“In any case,” Wilfrid says patiently, as if what he’s doing, as if the sacred trust he’s in the process of betraying, is perfectly reasonable, “the letters are safer in your hands.”
“Safer from what?”
“From prying eyes. I’ve had reason for some time to think my correspondence is being tampered with. Some letters I was waiting for didn’t arrive. I don’t want to take any further chances.”
Émilie tries to think, to understand this. What is he saying, exactly? That her letters have been read by others? That she must no longer write to him? She struggles to absorb the fact that he’s abandoning incalculable years of their lives. Every one of those pages is stained with her tears, her heart’s blood, but all she can think to say is, “What do you want me to do with them?”
“Safeguard them, my dear. For both our sakes. And read them. You’ll discover what a superb author you are.”
“I didn’t write them for publication.”
“No, you wrote them for me, but also yourself. They’ll reacquaint you with the woman you were.”
“And who have you been?”
“You have my letters.”
“They claim you want to be with me.”
“They were—and are—correct.”
“If that were true,” she cries miserably, “you wouldn’t be returning mine! You’d keep them, you’d cherish them. They won’t curl up and die like, like these roses you’ve brought!” She feels an urge to pull his roses from the vase and dash them to the floor, deterred only by fear of tearing her fingers on the thorns.
“My dear,” Wilfrid begins—
“What about ‘My dearest, ever dearer’? What about St. Anne’s Hill? What about the distant violin? What has happened, Wilfrid?”
She glances left and right, anywhere, as long as it’s away from him. She wants to flee the room but has nowhere to go. Without warning she feels his hands hot on her skin, his fingers clamped on her bare upper arms. He brings his face up close to hers, a frantic anxiety playing about his eyes. “Please, Émilie, don’t misunderstand me. Don’t be unjust!”
“What you’re doing is the most unjust thing I can imagine!” She wants to pull free of him but knows it will only send him into a panic. She allows him to continue holding onto her, even though it’s beginning to hurt.
“I know how this must seem to you,” he pleads, “how it must look, but believe me, I’d shout my love from the rooftops if I could. Try to understand: a Prime Minister’s papers, even his private ones, are no longer his own. They become public property. Do we want the eyes of strangers prying into our most personal moments? Better to safeguard our privacy by putting it in your hands. That’s all I ask, my dearest: take care of these precious letters of yours. And let me come and reread them now and then.”
He’s so desperate, so sincere, his request so reasonable. Slowly he releases his grip on her arms and subsides against the settee, waiting for her to concede.
She stares at the flesh of her arms, still showing the marks of his fingertips. She waits for the trembling to stop. “So you haven’t given up on us?” she asks dully.
“Not in the least.”
“St. Anne’s Hill could still be ours?”
“If only you knew how much I want it.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“I hate to see you distressed and sad. But I understand—all this waiting is painful.”
“It’s intolerable.”
“You’ve had reason to doubt and distrust me in the past, but now, never. No matter how often I read them, those passages in St. Anne’s Hill still bring our dream alive. It haunts me more than ever—especially in these labours I’m taking on.”
“Yes. Labours that will keep you chained for years to come.” She laughs ruefully, in spite of herself. “We’ll be old and toothless by the time we reach St. Anne’s Hill.”
She feels calmer, her anger drained, released into the ocean of their mutual need for reassurance.
Impulsively he reaches for her hand, caressing her palm with his fingertips. “When people see us tottering along the sidewalk, they’ll say, ‘Just look at those two, what a delightful old couple. And so in love!’”
Wilfrid enfolds her in a farewell embrace ending in a kiss on the mouth, then leaves to collect Zoë. They’re going to a garden party to which Émilie isn’t invited.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she drains an entire glass of lemonade. Her throat is parched, strained with unshed tears. She feels numb. Not quite there. The silence has a sinister quality.
The parcel full of her letters sits bulging, unopened, on the settee, a gift she never wanted. It repels her. She’ll have to secrete it somewhere in the room, in her luggage perhaps. Joseph is returning soon. She must change into a more everyday dress.
Her hands haven’t stopped shaking, faint tremors running up her wrists. Something has happened, something acknowledged, yet unacknowledged. Its meaning still isn’t fully clear to her. What is clear is that the rest of her life remains to be lived: only not in the way she imagined.
In her mind she’s kept alive the image of a country lane winding mysteriously into some gentle forest of the future, beckoning to her. All she had to do was follow that path. Now she sees it obstructed, barred by an ugly brick wall. Wilfrid put the wall there. He has the power to make her future possible or impossible, and she hates him for it: no one has a right to such power! Surely he’s the most self-centred, capricious, unprincipled man alive, capable of fabricating the most treacherous illusions, communicating the most convoluted double meanings, which only he can interpret. She sees miserably that this is also one of the reasons why she loves him.
Is this how the end comes? Not the end: not yet. Émilie applies her mind to the problem. To know the truth of her position, she need only recall his words, written in his own hand. Having pored endlessly