Sweet Agony

‘Of course I only gave you a minute. I had no idea you had decided to strip off and yank everything on in my hallway. You are aware you are in my hallway, are you not?’

‘In the excitement I forgot,’ I tell him, and know immediately that I used the wrong word. His eyebrow flickers the moment I say it, and I can’t stop my face heating. Most likely he sees right through me. He probably knows where my thoughts are going, and even if he has no clue his next demand seals my fate.

‘Turn around,’ he says abruptly. So abruptly I can only blurt out a startled ‘what?’

And then he says it again.

‘Turn around, Ms Parker.’

This time I obey. I go slowly, of course, most of me nervous about what he might be going to do. I’m so used to rough treatment that I think of him manhandling me out of the hall first, rather than anything sweeter or finer. I don’t imagine for a moment that this is going to feel like someone stroking a hand over my cheek as I sleep. I don’t think it will make my body buzz, but oh, God, it does.

The very second I feel him touching the buttons I slide away on a wave of something strange. Bliss, I think, but how can I know for sure? No one has ever fastened me up like this before, and even if they had I doubt they would have done it like this. I have the barest sense of unbelievably deft fingers arranging and rearranging without making contact.

He doesn’t brush my skin. There is no real sense of him.

So it seems outrageous that the non-existent contact should flood my body with heat. That it should leave my cheeks flushed and other parts of me burning. All the funny things I want to say suddenly die on my lips. I can’t tell him that he’s a supercilious control freak, when my nipples are tightening inside this infernal dress. I can’t accuse him of wanting to cop a feel, when this was the furthest thing from that.

He steps away as though he barely did a thing – and why not? He did barely do a thing. Any excitement I may feel comes from me and my apparently insane libido. Once the door closes behind me, I have to take deep breaths, and even afterwards the currents of sensation do not ebb away.

Only my dignity does that, despite my best efforts to hold on to it.

Chapter Four (#u6c47605b-80b4-5bf1-a1d2-d115fdc067db)

I tell myself that I am not going to react in an inappropriate way to him again. He gives me no reason to, after all. He may be extremely clever and very attractive and always wear ridiculously sexy things like cravats and velvet jackets, but that is no reason to lose my head. I have to be better than that. I am better than that. I am practical and level-headed. I know that life is not a novel by Charlotte Brontë, and even if it was I would probably hate it.

I bet it was cold all the time back then, and miserable, and when you think about it Rochester seems like a complete arsehole. He abandons his first wife and sluts his way around Europe, then has the nerve to complain about it all as though the world did him wrong. Is that really the kind of man I like?

Because that is undoubtedly the kind of man Harcroft is. No one could be that gorgeous and not have treated at least one woman really badly. I bet she writes him sad letters all the time and he just laughs and tells his haughty friends at the Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club about it, even though he doesn’t go to a Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club. In truth, I’m starting to suspect he never goes anywhere or does anything. He seems to have no real job, though that could be explained by an enormous inheritance.

That he never leaves the house, however, is slightly harder to explain.

And especially when he seems so uncomfortable around me.

Sometimes he stops in the hall when he sees me coming, then goes in the opposite direction. When he wants to say anything to me he usually writes notes, some of which I suspect come by carrier pigeon. They just appear on my windowsill at the oddest times, on the sort of stationery I feel should be reserved for writing to the Queen. In fact, it’s probably too good for the likes of her.

He uses tiny envelopes, and writes my name on them in narrow but elegant handwriting – as though there could be anyone else he might want to write to in his own house. And, in case that’s not spectacular enough, he seals the envelopes with wax. Honest to God, that is what he does. Each one has a little red circle of the stuff, with what I assume is his family crest pressed into the centre.

I have to crack the seals to get at the contents, the way Anne Boleyn probably did when Henry wrote to say he was chopping her head off. In truth, when I open the first one, I almost expect it to say something similar, like ‘Due to the weird moment we had in the hall I expect you to report to the parlour promptly for your beheading,’ and I’m not far wrong. ‘I insist you refrain from making eye contact with me,’ it says, and the second one isn’t much better. That comes after I’ve just finished sweeping the hallway with one of his many brooms – so many, in fact, that I suspect he may be a witch – and it has just three words printed on card that probably cost more than my car, in ink that looks like unicorn blood.

‘You swept wrong,’ it says.

At which point I get a little bit annoyed. Not as annoyed as Anne Boleyn probably was when she realised Henry was a serial killer, but not far off. I start planning what I would say back to him, if only he would stop disappearing behind doors and bookcases and that probably fake wall in the parlour. More than planning really – my mind damn near overflows with clever comebacks and silly leaps in logic. It’s as though our previous conversations turned some faucet on inside me, and now the water is flooding everything. It gets under my guard and makes a mess of my thoughts, until finally I just have to let it out somehow.

The third note practically forces me. ‘Do you understand what sweeping is?’ it says, and then there is nothing else I can do. ‘It’s the thing I’m going to do to your face if you send me one more note about it,’ I write, in the most careful cursive I’ve ever used. I even fashion an envelope, and blob a little wax on it from the candle in the lamp. Of course I have no family crest, but somehow I feel a swirly M carved into the seal says enough. It certainly gives me a great deal of satisfaction to set my little makeshift letter on the table by his favourite chair – and even more so when he responds.

Oh, my God, when he responds.

I think it’s then that I fully understand what we are doing here. It just comes over me the second I see the first words, so willing to just go with this absurd idea. As though he was just waiting for this all along, and now finally he has me, he has me, he has me so damned hard. ‘If you can explain to me how a face might be swept I will concede the point,’ he writes, and I almost run to the desk in my room. I sit down at it with sweating palms and shivering insides and my heart nearly bursting out of my chest. He never meant to just insult you, my giddy mind yelps, and my giddy mind is right. He wants me to write back. He wants to correspond with me.

Holy mother of fuck, we are corresponding.

‘First I lift the broom from the floor,’ I write, and I could swear my insides sing when I do. My pen flies across the page, no longer concerned with creating some fancy swirling script. I just want to get the words down and send them back, so I can see what he has to say next. No doubt he will point out that ‘swirling the bristles until his eyebrows come off’ is not possible. He may even suggest I look up ‘broom’in the dictionary to improve my sweeping knowledge.

All of which sounds very exciting to me.

But not as exciting as what he actually says.

‘If your object is to remove my eyebrows, wax applied while I am sleeping would obviously make a good deal more sense. However, as I never sleep there is a very slim chance of this ever happening,’ he writes, now so hasty all of his words are starting to slant to the left. He forgot to cross half of his Ts and is pressing down much too hard. When I hold the paper in my hands I can feel each word like a strange Braille beneath, spelling out for me what I can already see.

He is passionate about whatever this is.

It fires him up, in a way I can tell he is not used to. He can’t quite handle it, as evidenced by the typos and the pressure but most importantly by how wide open he leaves himself. Seriously, I could drive a bus through those sentences. I have to reverse a little and just nudge into them, because, God, if I said what I really wanted to…He can never know what I would say if I really wanted to. He gets the edited version, and even that goes a step too far. ‘You should probably refrain from tempting me into random acts of waxing you in the middle of the night,’ I write, then add in a fit of madness, ‘I might not stop with your eyebrows.’

As soon as I leave the letter for him I want to take it back. I keep cringing over it as I spray the bathrooms on the second floor with Flash, so sure that this is the thing that will get me fired. Or if not fired, then at least a long, long silence. I even prepare myself for it, by not going back to my room for hours and hours. I pretend I barely care whether there’s a letter there, and plan on shrugging when I find nothing. Maybe I won’t even look towards the windowsill, where one always sits.

That way, I pre-empt my own disappointment.

I get it, before it can get me – which sounds insane but has worked for me so many times in the past. I never really wanted to go to the library anyway; I wasn’t actually interested in that notebook for Christmas; I don’t even know what Christmas is. Christmas is just like any other day, so macaroni cheese alone in the bathroom is fine. All of my life is fine, everything is fine, I swear it is, it really is…until I get to my room and the letter is there.

Until I open it and find the following:

‘Are you threatening me with theft of my chest hair, Ms Parker? If so you should know I barely have enough to make such an enterprise worthwhile. You could probably remove it all simply by blowing in my general direction, though doing so will earn you as much admonition as if you had snuck into my room and plucked each one with a pair of tweezers.’

And then I finally understand what I was really doing all along. I wasn’t fine at all; I was just settling. I didn’t stave off disappointment by opening the door for it; I just let it into the room with me sooner. I pulled up a chair for it and pretended we were friends, even though it spat in my face and stole everything I had.

It took the joy out of my life, and I know that now because when I read those ridiculous words all of it comes flooding back into me in one long glorious gush. My body fills with a delirious happiness – and all over something so simple and small. He just plays along with me. That’s all he does and yet that is all it takes.

Just someone to write insanely overblown letters about hair thievery with. Someone who is so into it that when I go to take out a pen and paper to reply I find stationery, the same sort as he has been using. I find beautiful envelopes and little cream cards and a pen, oh, God, a fountain pen. Does he know how often I sat in my diseased mess of a high school and dreamed of using a fountain pen? How I would close my eyes and will away the biro in my hand and replace it with something so like this I could cry?

I do cry, when I come across the wax and the seal.

He has even gone to the trouble of making a seal for me. It has my initials linked in a regal-looking loop, as though when he time-travelled to another century he took me with him. Now we get to live out this nineteenth-century fantasy together, and, oh, it is bliss. So much so that the next note I send almost tells him that very thing.

‘This is the best thing that has ever happened to me’, I think of writing, and even though I manage to contain myself I do a lot of other inadvisable things. I step too jauntily and search for him without meaning to and, most ridiculously and unexpectedly, I catch myself singing. I have never sung in my life.

But I do. There I am, minding my own business, when suddenly it just bursts out of me. And, true, his dusty old record collection is probably partly to blame. I saw the title of one of them only seconds before, and it was a song I happened to know. Yet, even so, it kind of shocks me – and not just because it’s me trilling away.

There is also the line I choose to sing.

‘When you kiss me heaven sighs,’ I sing, so full of feeling that I want to stop before it gets any worse. Before he hears me, and thinks I mean that he is the kisser I’m imagining, when I promise he absolutely is not. He is not my ‘La Vie En Rose’, all right?

Not even when I hear a sound from the other side of the house.

One that falters and fails and fumbles into something, when I sing the next line of the song. ‘Give your heart and soul to me,’ I sing, and there it is again. First one note, fine and high, and then another and another, each clearer than the last, until I have to accept the stone-cold truth: that is him playing the piano. Somewhere in the house he is tentatively accompanying my painful singing, and so beautifully that I could never mistake it for anything but what it is.

He is saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting.

Good God, is he really saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting? It seems impossible, but, no matter how hard I sing, he keeps up. I practically reach for the sky with the line about ‘angels singing from above’, and still he responds in kind. By the time I get to the last ‘La Vie En Rose’he is adding chords to other chords and running them together one after another in a way the song doesn’t even call for.