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Back and forth she swipes the lead across the page.
Wise girls they know that silver tongues do lie.
They are but dogs which sniff bark sniff and spit anddrool
They are but slavering
Those men are dogs, they hunt their prey by day.
Do not go blindly into that bright light.
She drops the pencil. Her hand is over her mouth. The whole poem lies before her, white scrawl in a crazy charcoal cloud. She had thought this poem too clever in comparison to the other offerings. Instinct told her it could not be by the same hand. But as she has done so many times, she dismissed instinct once Lottie confessed. Dismissed it and forgot it.
I’m so sorry I wrote the horrible poems, Lottie said in her letter, though of course she didn’t list them. Why would she?
Peter wrote this after all. Seeing that it was him she turned to in her fear and vulnerability, he wrote this presumably out of some desire to capitalise. Here was an opportunity to bind her even tighter to him in all his insecurity and ongoing diminishment. Pregnancy was not enough. She wouldn’t marry him, no matter all that he was and owned. He needed more. He claimed to be offering her safety, but it was he who needed it, he who feared being alone. He told her she was the one as he drew his last breath. She thinks now that it was, possibly, the truth. He loved her so much, he took a poem written in love for a man’s blind dying father, a poem he himself had read aloud at his own father’s funeral, and used it as an instrument of mental cruelty designed to keep her where he wanted her: with him, for ever. She thinks of the seduction that was not a seduction, the lingerie that was in no way a suggestion, and this, this desperate warning to flee from him that was in fact the opposite, the absolute opposite. The most audacious of his double bluffs, my God.
‘What did you do?’ she whispers into the night. ‘What did you do, my beautiful, beautiful monster?’
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