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She carried it on a tray, and he trailed beside her up the stairs to steady her trembling hands. They knocked on the door and Clarence opened it from within. Mr. Edwards sat, jovial, in his pinstriped pajamas. He was watching the Discovery channel.
“Be careful—it’s still hot,” Ada said, and he blew it thrice before bringing it to his mouth.
Bron only hoped he could stomach it. Or that his illness had ridden him of his sense of taste.
“Mmm, it’s wonderful, Ada—truly scrumptious. We’ll make a chef of you yet!”
Ada cheered, and hurried quickly to fetch some water at his request.
“Clarence,” he said, once Ada was out of the room. “Would you be a dear and bring me the salt? It is quite an emergency.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Don’t go telling Ada now.” Mr. Edwards winked at him.
Over the next few days he seemed to get better, and then worsen, only to appear better again. The family doctor, Mr. Braddon, paid his visit between the hours of three and four, every Tuesday and Thursday, but offered little in the way of illuminating Mr. Edwards’s ailment. With each visit he would touch the wooden stick to Mr. Edwards’s yellowing tongue, which made him gag, and measured his breathing with a cold touch of the stethoscope to his back, which made him flinch. Mr. Edwards assured the household that everything was fine and as it should be, but it had become clearer to all that it wasn’t simply a batch of bad prawns that had cast him to his bed.
Bron felt a change in the air, like a mounting pressure. He wasn’t sure what exactly had changed, if anything at all, only that the buildup inside him amounted to a nervous fretting that left him constantly on edge. He feared the thought that ate away inside him: knowing, beyond reason, how this would go. Mysterious illnesses—they led to sudden death.
Was Mr. Edwards going to die? On some days he thought he might. When Ada brought his tea to bed, they often found him asleep. When he wasn’t, he could hear the shortness of his breath, could sense the way that Mr. Edwards’s nodding and smiling at Ada’s attempt to soothe him was a suffering throughpain in silence, an attempt to mask discomfort. His lymph nodes inflamed. He would barely touch his dinner, and the weight loss was quick to take effect, and most evident in his face. He called Bron by the wrong name more than once.
Bron wanted to take Darcy aside and alert him to his worries. Could it be tuberculosis? The profuse night sweats, the high temperature, the weight loss and fatigue. All the symptoms were there! Had Darcy spoken to the doctor directly? What, exactly, did they say was wrong? But then, Mr. Edwards seemed suddenly himself, laughing and cracking jokes, inviting Ada to hop onto the bed. Madame Clarence would bring in his medicine and his yellow tea and order him to sip it. At his gentle protest, she’d launch into a spiel of French, to which Mr. Edwards responded back. Bron had never heard him speak the language, but it seemed he was quite fluent. Without Ada there to translate, the conversation was lost on him. Once the medicine had been taken, Clarence brought him a plate of beef lasagna, his favorite meal, but his appetite had never been fully restored.
There was one evening, when the moon lingered silver like a broach on a cloaked sky, when Ada and Mr. Edwards fell asleep together early, at eight o’clock. Bron took to walking along the paths outside, to take in the air that smelled heavily of burning wood. At the edge of the lane, he saw the chiaroscuro of Darcy’s outline against the moonlight. He knew what he wanted to do before he did it: like a physical reaction, he wound his way to Darcy’s side. Didn’t think too hard about it, just brushed his hand against his. Darcy always brushed back.
They filled the silences with whatever it was they could: Darcy’s enjoyment of the spring season, the way the rhododendrons were in bloom. They spoke of Ada’s commitment to the caring role and how wonderfully she’d behaved through all this. Bron shared how Ada took to turning off all the sockets and electricals before bed. That she had become quite the busy bee. In fact, she hadn’t sat with her schoolwork in days and had become more demanding of him in the evenings, often needing his presence inorder to sleep. This was something they ought to discuss when Mr. Edwards was better.
The discussion of Ada’s bedtime stories prompted him to ask, “Why does Mr. Edwards call you his prodigal son? Ada mentioned it once, and I couldn’t help but think about it.”
“You know the parable? You didn’t strike me as the Bible-reading kind.”
“Going to a religious boarding school for more than ten years makes you the Bible-reading kind even if you aren’t the Bible-reading kind.” Bron laughed.
When Darcy relayed a summary of the parable back to him, he didn’t stop him. Instead, he listened to the lull of his voice, the natural way of his oration.
“Years ago, when I left my family, when I left England, I admit I may have dipped into my father’s pocket more than once. I just bought a flight to wherever it would take me. Ordered the most extravagant champagnes and alcohols for myself and anyone who wanted them. Quite the bachelor’s dream. But it couldn’t go on for long, and my father, well, you wouldn’t have guessed what he was like back then. Or what he thought of me. I was loathsome.”
“Mr. Edwards?” he said. “I can’t imagine him disliking anyone, let alone his own son.”
“Well, imagine it. I was twenty and already on the path to ruining my life—I’d dropped out of university months before graduating, separated myself from those I cared about the most, and drunk myself into oblivion. When I finally had the courage to answer one of his many calls, he demanded to know where I was, and I threatened never to return. Theatrical, I know—I had to inherit at least some quality from him—but at that moment, I couldn’t have said anything more truthful. I never wanted to come back. I detested my life here. My life and everyone in it. Everything that happened—it was all too much.”
“What did happen, Darcy?” Bron asked, thinking of Giovanni and of the woman Darcy had been married to. He interlaced his fingers with Darcy’s. “You can tell me. It’s okay.”
And to his slight astonishment, Darcy did tell him. Told him everything that had happened between him and Giovanni and how awfully it had ended. Bron’s suspicions had been correct—they had been close. They’d enjoyed times together in France, developed an intimacy through their years at university. At one point, they’d even considered themselves boyfriends.
“Boyfriends?”
“Indeed, and all in secret, of course. As necessary.”
“But why the secret? Your father—”
“—has not always been the man you know today, Bron. He didn’t always understand. You see him now as this carefree man, and quite the caricature of it, with a penchant for drink, but he wasn’t always like that. Well, I guess the drink always was there, but he was much moretraditional,” Darcy stressed in a way that imbued meaning. “Once upon a time he was quite fixated on what a family of our standing ought and ought not to be, what my future would look like, and—well, I didn’t fit the bill.”
Bron couldn’t imagine the joyous, benevolent man who’d taken him in and welcomed him into their home as being anyone other than the person he was today. Completely accepting of who Bron was, a father proud of his children. But people, they were capable of change. He thought, then, of Mrs. Flanders, who years after admitting her mistake, still vied for her child.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that. But he is a different person now and only wants to do good by you. He loves you for who you are. You and Ada both—I’m sure of it.” When Darcy added nothing to this, he hastened to say, “And if it makes you feel any better, I absolutely cannot imagineanyonefitting the bill of pompous straight-acting twat more than you.”
Darcy pursed his lips and thrust forward, grabbing Bron under his arms. He tickled him lightly and ordered him, “Take it back—”
