Scandalous

Chapter 24

Daniel had put his name down on Thursday, as promised.

Nathan had found out about this when he arrived at the staff room Thursday morning to find a printed schedule on the noticeboard with his name in the eight-to-eleven slot next to Refreshments Station — East Wall, and Daniel sitting at the far table with his coffee and the expression of a man who has completed an administrative task and is very pleased with himself.

"I said I'd let you know by Thursday," Nathan said, looking at the schedule.

"And it is Thursday," Daniel said. "So here we are."

Nathan looked at him. Daniel looked back with the comfortable imperviousness of a man who has gotten what he wanted and is not going to expend energy defending it.

Nathan got his coffee and said nothing else about it.

He arrived at the gymnasium at five past seven on Friday evening wearing the closest thing he could produce to a costume with forty-eight hours notice and zero genuine enthusiasm for the project: a white shirt, a dark waistcoat, and a pocket watch he'd had since university, which he felt could plausibly be read as some kind of Victorian aesthetic if anyone asked and which he planned to describe as a character from literature in the event anyone pressed the point. It was, technically, a costume in the same way that putting on a hat was technically a disguise.

Daniel was waiting at the main doors in a full Sherlock Holmes ensemble — the deerstalker, the cape, the pipe — with the energy of a man who had committed completely and was entirely comfortable with this.

Nathan looked at him.

"Before you say anything," Daniel said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Your face was saying something."

"My face was doing nothing," Nathan said, and went inside.

The gymnasium had been transformed with the specific, effortful energy of a school event committee that had taken its brief seriously. Orange and purple lights on rigs along the rafters, which cast everything in a low, Halloween-appropriate atmosphere that was more effective than he'd expected. Paper bats in various sizes suspended from the basketball hoops. Fog machine at the far end near the DJ booth that produced a floor-level atmospheric effect that would last approximately forty minutes before someone walked through it too many times and it dispersed. The drinks table along the east wall was draped in black cloth and held the promised punch — non-alcoholic, a bright and slightly aggressive orange, with a dry ice effect that was genuinely well-executed and meant that every cup lifted from the table trailed a small wisp of vapor.

Nathan stationed himself beside it.

He looked at the gymnasium. He looked at the punch. He looked at the dry ice effect with the expression of a man acknowledging, against his will, that someone had done this correctly.

Students arrived in the incremental, building wave of a school event reaching its advertised start time — first in small groups, then in larger ones, the volume increasing, the costumes assembling themselves into the broad categories he'd predicted. The interpretive end of Halloween was well-represented: several groups of girls in the coordinated costumes that functioned as ensemble pieces, a substantial contingent of boys in things that required minimal assembly — a cape here, a mask there, the full-body character onesie that had somehow remained a fixture of teenage Halloween for as long as Nathan could remember. A student came past the drinks table as an elaborate shark, which he appreciated on the grounds of commitment.

He poured punch for a series of people he recognised from various classes, maintaining the composed pleasantness of a teacher at a school function. He checked the punch periodically with the vigilance Daniel had requested. He thought about Henderson and the vodka situation from last year and applied himself to the task with sufficient professionalism that he felt confident the situation was not going to repeat itself on his watch.

He had been there approximately forty-five minutes when he became aware that the ambient volume near the main doors had shifted slightly — not louder, but a different quality of it, the specific social adjustment of a room that has registered something.

He looked up.

Claire Monroe came in first. She was dressed as an angel — the kind of angel that represented a fairly liberal interpretation of the celestial theme: white minidress, silver halo on a headband, white wings that she was wearing with the complete, unself-conscious confidence of a girl who knows exactly what she looks like and has no complicated feelings about it. She came through the doors with the momentum of someone arriving at a party she intends to enjoy, scanning the room immediately, cataloguing, already smiling at something she could see from the entrance.

She turned back to say something to the person behind her.

Shae walked in.

Nathan's hand, which had been in the process of refilling the ladle on the punch bowl, became temporarily irrelevant to him.

She had her hair loose — the dark weight of it, falling to the middle of her back. She was in a dress that was pale — not white, but the specific ivory of something aged, something old, with a fitted bodice and sleeves that came to the wrist and a skirt that fell in layers to the floor. Simple. No elaborate embellishment. In her hair she had small, dried flowers woven through the dark strands — the kind that were white once and had turned the color of old paper, arranged with the deliberate, unpretentious care of someone who had chosen them for their meaning rather than their spectacle.

He knew the costume.

He knew it the way you know something that has been in front of you continuously for the past three weeks, the way a book you've been teaching lives in you differently than books you've only read. The pale dress. The flowers in dark hair. The specific, quiet beauty of someone who had chosen to arrive at a Halloween dance as Catherine Earnshaw.

His hand finished its task with the ladle. He looked at the punch bowl with studied attention.

Claire had spotted him from across the room. He could tell this without looking directly at her because he could see the small, animated thing she said to Shae, and the way Shae's head turned, and the moment of stillness before she looked in his direction.

He met her eyes. He inclined his head — the small, professional nod of a teacher acknowledging a student at a school event, nothing more specific than that.

She returned it. The same composed economy.

They went into the crowd.

He managed approximately an hour before she came to the drinks table.

It was not, he told himself, that he had been aware of her position in the room throughout that hour. It was that the drinks table was along the east wall and afforded a reasonable view of the gymnasium generally, and his function this evening was to keep a general awareness of the space, and this included the space where students were. This was a professional responsibility.

He was aware, with a specificity he found inconvenient, of where she was.

She spent the first part of the evening with Claire — they moved through the room in the easy, familiar way of people who have spent enough time together that their social navigation is coordinated without being choreographed. Claire talked to everyone, pulled Shae into conversations and then moved on to the next one while Shae sometimes followed and sometimes didn't. Shae drifted toward the edges in the way she tended to drift toward the edges of rooms, talking occasionally, watching more.

She looked, Nathan thought with the resignation of a man who has given up arguing with himself about certain categories of observation, genuinely extraordinary. The costume was the kind of thing you could only do if you were already who the costume required you to be — there was no gap between Shae Madison and Catherine Earnshaw that the dress needed to bridge. The pale dress in the Halloween light. The flowers in the dark hair. The green eyes and the quality of stillness she carried. She looked like something out of the novel, and she had done this deliberately and quietly and without the exhibitionism that Halloween usually required, and he could not look at it for too long without his chest doing the thing it had been doing since the grocery store.

He looked at the punch.

"Is it spiked?"

He looked up.

She was standing at the drinks table with a small smile. Claire was visible behind her, several people away, deep in what appeared to be a very animated conversation with someone in a full astronaut suit.

"Not yet," he said. He picked up the ladle. "Cup?"

"Please."

He filled it. The dry ice made the cup trail vapor as he handed it to her. She took it and looked at the effect with the brief, amused expression of someone who is genuinely charmed by small things despite trying not to be.

"Catherine Earnshaw," he said. He said it the way he would have said any observation — levelly, without inflection, as if it were simply a thing being identified.

She looked at him. "You got it immediately."

"We spent three weeks on the book," he said. "Also—" he looked at her, briefly and without dwelling "—you look the part."

She seemed to consider this, the slight pause of someone receiving a thing they're not entirely sure how to file. She sipped the punch. Made a face.

"It's aggressively orange," she said.

"It is," he agreed. "The effect looks better than it tastes. I believe that was the committee's priority."

"A reasonable aesthetic choice," she said, sipping again with the equanimity of someone who has decided it's fine. She looked at the room — the lights, the students, the fog machine's last efforts at the far end. "I didn't know you'd be here."

"Neither did I," he said, honestly, "until Thursday morning."

She looked at him with the expression that was almost a smile. "Hazards of the job."

"Apparently."

She stood at the table for a moment — not lingering, exactly, or not performing lingering, just the natural pause of a person who has come for a drink and hasn't quite decided when she's finished with this particular moment. The orange light caught the pale fabric of her dress and the flowers in her hair. Nathan looked at the punch bowl.

"Enjoying it?" he asked. "Despite the punch."

She considered. "The fog machine is good. Claire found someone she knows from somewhere else, which means I've had approximately twenty minutes of genuine quiet, which is — actually ideal, for a party." She glanced at him sideways. "You?"

"I've maintained the integrity of the refreshments station," he said. "Which is the entirety of my mandate."

She laughed — the quiet, genuine version. "Very dedicated."

"I try."

She looked at him for a moment. The Halloween light caught her eyes and made them a different shade of green than the classroom light did, and he was aware of this fact with the particular, unwelcome precision of a man who has started noticing shades of green.

"I should find Claire before she disappears entirely," she said. She lifted the cup slightly — the small gesture of acknowledgment. "Goodnight, Mr. Kingston."

"Goodnight, Miss Madison," he said.

She turned and moved back into the crowd. The pale dress and the dark hair and the flowers moved through the orange light and the press of people and became part of the general, shifting mass of the room.

Nathan put the ladle down.

He looked at the punch bowl. He looked at the gymnasium. He performed the careful, deliberate act of looking at the room as a room, as a space containing several hundred students and his professional responsibility, and not as the particular configuration it had briefly been thirty seconds ago.

Daniel appeared at his elbow with the deerstalker still on and a cup of punch.

"Having fun?" Daniel asked.

"I'm riveted," Nathan said.

Daniel sipped. Made the same face Shae had made. Looked at the cup. "This is terrible."

"It has good visual presentation," Nathan said.

"That's the nicest thing you can say about it."

They stood at the drinks table for a while after that. Daniel talked. Nathan listened with appropriate responsiveness, making the contributions to the conversation that were expected of him, maintaining the surface of a man who was simply doing what he was here to do.

He did not look at the middle of the room.

He was not tracking pale ivory fabric in orange light.

He was not, at any point, noting its location.

At eleven-fifteen, the lights came up and the DJ announced the official end of the evening, and the students moved toward the exits in the drifting, social, reluctant manner of people who have been told a thing is over and are accepting it gradually. Nathan collected the cups and handed the table back to the catering staff with the tidy competence of a man completing a task, and shook Daniel's hand, and walked out of the school building into the cool, clear October night.

He sat in his car for a moment without starting it.

He started the engine. He drove.

The study light was off when he got home.

He noticed this first — the absence of the thin line of light under the door that was the standard condition of most evenings. He read the house: kitchen dark, sitting room dark, the low warm lamp on the landing upstairs.

He went upstairs.

The bedroom door was open.

Maryanne was sitting on the edge of the bed.

He stopped in the doorway and took her in, and it took him a full second to process what he was looking at because it was so far outside the established pattern of how Friday evenings went that his brain needed the second to catch up.

She was in lingerie he hadn't seen before — dark charcoal silk and black lace in the configuration of something chosen with deliberate, careful intent. The cut of it was architectural in the way expensive things were architectural, structured to do specific work, and on Maryanne — the auburn hair loose and falling past her shoulders, the pale skin of her catching the lamp's warm light, the dark lips and the long lines of her — it was doing that work with complete effectiveness. She sat with the unhurried composure of a woman who knows exactly what she looks like and has arranged herself accordingly and intends to wait as long as she needs to.

He could count on one hand the number of times in eleven years she had done this. The specific deliberateness of it — the waiting, the lamp, the choice — this was not a casual thing. This was a statement.

She looked at him.

He crossed the room.

She pulled him to her by the loosened tie — one hand, deliberate, not rough but not gentle either, the grip of a woman who has decided something and is executing it. Her mouth found his directly, without preliminary, the specific kissing of Maryanne when she had already decided how the evening was going to go. He felt her hands move to his waistcoat and work the buttons with the brisk, practiced efficiency of someone clearing a path — pushed it from his shoulders without looking. Her fingers went to his shirt.

He helped her. He stripped the shirt off and dropped it and stood in front of her and she ran her hands over his chest and his stomach with the assessing quality she always brought to this — the woman who was used to the geography of him but was choosing, tonight, to pay attention to it. He wasn't built for spectacle — the lean, average-built result of a man who was active enough but not obsessed with it, the body of someone who had aged into his thirties without catastrophe. She pressed her palm flat against his sternum and then lower, and when she found what she was looking for through the fabric she made a small, satisfied sound low in her throat.

He worked his belt. The trousers. He pushed everything off with the economy of a man who has been relieved of the need to be tentative and is not going to squander the absence of it.

She looked at him. Ran her tongue slowly across her lower lip. Reached for him.

Her hand wrapped around him and he exhaled through his teeth — the involuntary, quiet sound of a man receiving something after a particular kind of absence. She stroked him slowly, deliberately, with the controlled precision of a woman who understood exactly what she was doing and was doing it at the pace she chose, which was not his pace, which was never his pace, which was always the pace she decided on and he accepted because the alternative was not being touched at all and he was not going to make that argument tonight.

He reached for her instead. Slid the silk up her thigh, found the lace at her hip, moved his hand beneath it, and felt her breath change immediately — the specific, slight intake that she couldn't always control, the tell she'd never fully acknowledged. He worked her slowly and felt her hips shift against his hand, the small, involuntary adjustment of a body responding before the mind had approved the response.

She let him do this for longer than he expected. Her hand still on him, matching his pace, the two of them reading each other in the low lamplight with the practiced fluency of eleven years — knowing where the tension was, knowing what it took, knowing the specific vocabulary of the other person's body the way you know a text you've read until it's memorised.

Then she lay back.

It was a deliberate movement — controlled, chosen, the specific act of a woman adjusting the terms. She looked up at him with the dark eyes and the auburn hair spread across the pillow and the charcoal silk still on her — she'd kept it on, which was Maryanne — and what her expression communicated was unambiguous.

He moved over her. She reached for him, guided him, and he pressed forward slowly, feeling her stretch and accommodate around him — the long, measured slide of it, the specific exhale she released when he was fully seated inside her, her nails pressing briefly into his shoulder.

He held still for a moment. Felt her. The warmth of her, the familiar fit of it, the particular intimacy of this kind of stillness.

Then he moved.

He set a pace that was deliberate and unhurried — deep, rolling thrusts, the kind that worked with the full measure of what he had rather than frantic urgency that stripped away precision. He felt her respond: the hips rising slightly to meet him, the breath shortening, the small sounds she made that she would never describe as sounds and which were nonetheless entirely real. He braced on one forearm and brought the other hand to her hip, the curve of her waist, the places he knew from years of this, and felt her move beneath him with the controlled, reluctant surrender of a woman who had decided, tonight, to receive rather than direct.

She was still doing it, though. Subtly. The slight angling of her hips, the pressure of her thigh against his, the hand at his back guiding the rhythm toward what she wanted — the direction so understated it could have been involuntary, except that nothing Maryanne did was involuntary. She maintained it even in the yielding. It was, he had always thought, one of the most completely Maryanne things about her: she could give you the wheel and still know where the car was going.

He let her have it. He worked within it, finding the pace that was both his and hers, the negotiated middle that was most of what this marriage had always been.

He felt her tighten around him — the building, involuntary response of it — and he leaned down and put his mouth to her throat and felt her head go back.

He was present. He was entirely present. He was—

—pale ivory in orange light. Dark hair and dried flowers the color of old paper. Green eyes in a specific shade that only existed in that room, in that light, when he'd said you look the part and immediately needed something else to look at—

He closed his eyes.

He shut it down with everything he had — a hard, immediate interior door slammed against the impression before it could take any further shape, before it became anything more than the flash it had been. He pressed his mouth harder to Maryanne's throat and concentrated on the warmth beneath him, the reality of her, the specific sounds she was making now that had nothing performed in them anymore.

The guilt arrived directly behind it. Immediate. Exactly as heavy as it deserved to be.

He stayed. He focused. He brought everything back to where it belonged — the woman in his bed, his wife, who had waited up for him in charcoal silk and was beneath him now with her hair spread across the pillow and her control finally starting to dissolve at the edges.

She came with the quality she always had — not theatrical, not announced, just sudden and real and briefly unguarded in a way she only ever was in this specific, private window. The sharp breath. The press of her fingers into his back. The sound she made that was low and entirely honest. He felt her pulse around him and followed — the long, focused release of it, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, the quiet that came after.

He lay beside her in the warm dark. His chest still moving. The room settling.

He waited for what came next.

What came next was Maryanne rolling over.

Not dramatically. Not with the force of the study door eleven days ago, not with any of the language of that night. Simply and quietly — the shifting of a woman who has gotten what she came for and is now arranging herself for sleep, the auburn hair falling across the pillow toward him as she turned her back, the silk a dark line against the white of the bedding. She pulled the duvet up over her shoulder. She closed her eyes.

That was it.

Nathan looked at the back of her head. At the curve of her shoulder beneath the duvet. At the specific quality of stillness that was Maryanne already withdrawing, already somewhere else, already finished with whatever tonight had been.

And he understood.

It was the clearest thing she'd said all week and she hadn't said a word. In Maryanne's internal accounting, the ledger that she kept with the private precision of a woman who never asked for anything she couldn't justify and never offered anything she couldn't afford — tonight had squared it. The argument, the silence, the drive home, the study door. All of it. She had offered what she considered sufficient, she had received what she'd come for, and in her mind the debt was settled and they were even and there was nothing further to discuss.

This was, he knew, the only form of apology she had.

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.

He thought about the three seconds. The flash of ivory and orange light and dark flowers that had come through the gap and which he had shut down and which he was not going to stop feeling guilty about simply because it was inconvenient to feel guilty about it.

He thought about standing at a drinks table in a school gymnasium with a pocket watch he'd had since university, watching the room with the careful, professional attention of a teacher chaperoning a school event.

He thought: this is not getting better.

He thought about Maryanne's breathing beside him, already slow and even, the uncomplicated sleep of a woman who has resolved the thing and moved on.

He thought about the specific, quiet symmetry of the two of them in this bed — one of them already somewhere else, one of them lying in the dark running an argument he kept losing against himself — and he felt the weight of eleven years like a thing he was carrying rather than living inside.

He did not turn off the lamp. It went off on its timer at midnight, the way it always did.

He lay there in the dark for a long time after.