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Darcy wound his arms around him, crushing him into an embrace. Two flat tree trunks, bending together, but not quite fitting. Darcy kissed him again, a slow, soft kiss that felt strange after the hardness of before. Bron kissed him back, more ferociously, still needing him and yet still repelled by him. But he knew the gulf between them was larger than the small distance that opened up between their bodies as Darcy pulled away. He would have grabbed for him if there hadn’t been a small knock on the door, then Ada’s quiet voice on the other side of it.
“Darcy? Are you awake? I heard a noise.”
Darcy pivoted toward the door. “Go back to bed at once, Ada,” he commanded. “I will come to you in a moment.” He turned back to Bron. “You are a strange thing, Brontë Ellis. Your follies may get you into trouble one day. I must go, as you now know, to my daughter. We will talk about this properly later.”
Bron’s heart would have ripped in two if he’d spoken another word. They shared a companionable silence before Darcy turned out of the room, leaving him there in the dark. He could chase after him, throw open the door and call out his name, beg again for his understanding. But he felt fully the separation from this man, even from this house.
This house. He felt it so assuredly now that he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it before: it hadn’t been built for someone like him, the vastness of its rooms begging to be filled with all sorts of visions and apparitions, where he had allowed himself to believe, to conjure up something sinister. This house that allowed his already existing follies to manifest themselves more fruitfully into serious delusions. Where he’d sunk further into the reliance of books and movies.This will happen, and then this will happen … and then this …again and again and again, reading and watching like a menace, cementing his experiences.Every time dependable. Every time knowing the route the story would take. His questions answered.
But Greenwood was a house, just a house. It didn’t symbolize anything. It wasn’t the set piece to a multimillion-dollar film, hired out for actors and a camera crew to shoot in. It didn’t harbor ghosts or feature as the backdrop to his own bildungsroman.
Who was he, standing there rooted to the spot and holding in his need to cry? Was he the same Bron he’d been a few minutes ago, or someone else entirely? He was no longer Lily James, reciting words that, at a stumble, could be repeated for as many takes as it would to get right; he wasn’t Keira Knightley, one moment a scandalous lover, the next Elizabeth Bennett. He was someone without an anchor, without a story.
All he could think was:What should I do? What should I do now?And the answer, he knew, was clear:I should go—I need to leave.Because his infatuation had reached a breaking point, and he knew Darcy would never look at him the same way again. This was his mistake with Harry, repeating itself all over again. Soon Darcy and Greenwood would all be a distant memory, something he would cling to and yearn for and no longer be a part of. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—have his heart broken again. If it was to be broken, it would be at his own hand. He would be the one to do it. Take himself out of the story he’d created here. The one who got to leave this time. So he did what needed to be done.
It wasn’t to be the grand, covert escape in the middle of the night that unrealities depicted it to be. He went slowly into his bedroom, meeting Clarence along the way. She had just come in to start the day. Accepting the gentle hand she left on his shoulder, he thanked her and locked his bedroom door once he’d reached it. He pulled the little kettle from its nook, clicking it on to boil. The whirring noise brought some comfort. He waited for the chamomile tea to brew. This would warm him from the inside. He packed his bag, the essentials of his things, readying himself for the long day ahead. There was no point arguing against it. It was time for him to leave.
PART IV
17
SUPPOSE A HEROINE ISwriting a letter at their desk. The mise-en-scène would depict a darkened room by candlelight, with the nib’s scratchings enhanced for full effect. Or in a moment of more pleasurable pursuits, it might frame the lattice window to capture the day’s angelic light. The trees in the distant view. A voiceover narrates their hand. They are writing of some urgent business, or to a now lost lover at sea. They may even be writing a book.
But Bron is not at his writing desk, for the room isn’t large enough to contain one.
He is propped up on a single bed, the rungs of its metal frame digging into his shoulder. He writes not for any specific reason; it is only that he finds the process of writing cleansing, an unlocking that allows his thoughts to freely flow.
Now he finds himself here. He is content with the room as it is, and grateful to Mrs. Flanders for welcoming him in. He hasn’t told her much, only that his living situation had turned suddenly sour, and he could no longer stay with the Edwardses. That he needed to get out that very morning.
“And the little one, she is okay?”
“She is okay,” he’d said.
She’d ushered him and his bags into the narrow hallway, pulled him into a hug when he broke down in tears. Offered hima cup of tea, demanded he make himself at home. Took him up the stairs and into a room. This used to be Ellie’s room, she said, but now she mostly refers to it as the “blue room,” adequately named after its sky-blue walls lined with damask silver wallpaper merging into dusty, royal-blue carpet. The carpet is fraying, reveals floorboards at the edges, and the wallpaper peels away, is splotched yellow in places, but Bron’s possessions make the room feel more comfortable and lived in, more like his lodgings used to be at St. Mary’s. He has stuck one of Ada’s drawings of him to the wall beside his bed and has laid out some clothes on the surface of a trunk.
When he is called down for tea, he steps onto the landing with its semicircular table affixed to the wall, a crocheted white tablecloth and a porcelain figure upon it, and moves down the stairs with shoes in his hands. He asks, “What am I to do with these, Mrs. Flanders?” holding out a pair of red heels. She meets him with a puzzled look, claiming to have never seen them before in her life, and asks him to leave them exactly where he has found them—that is, tucked away under the left side of the bed. He places them away into the cupboard instead, underneath a green parka jacket that also isn’t his. All the while he is thinking about the life that once lived in this room, and the lives of fictitious characters that take up residence in his head.
For they have bloomed there ever since his earlier years, when at first he begged his aunt for answers, some to do with matters of his origins, if his parents loved him, and later, how they died; and then again questions he asked at school, simply about the way the world worked. He was always met with a suffocating silence and learned to discover facts for himself, how to make up his own mind—the Big Bang versus God’s seven-day creation; Survival of the Fittest versus Man in God’s image—or else remain in the dark. In the in-between space of novels he found solace, his own boarding school life reflected in one particular work. He’d followed their trajectories with a prophetic eagerness, the works of great writers a crystal ball through which his own future wasrevealed, with its big country houses and the always brooding men. England and its green. Then came the movies, and his visual senses attuned to them, a strong receptor that blended life with stylized sequences, embedded fiction into memory.
Somewhere down the line he took things too far, twisted facts at liberty, a self-created delusion. With each circumstance that he’d fixed upon—the fire, the locket, the will—these props were there to guide him. No, not guide—mislead and bend him—into an already established framework. He remembered how he felt when first stepping into the manor, how the house, though large, was not foreboding. How his infatuation with what was to play out through his stay could be traced to the influence of Miss Charlotte Brontë, and maybe even Jane Austen too. Countless novels and movies overindulged in. Netflix, and its readily available content, there to throw him into some modern-day Regency or Victoriana at the click of a button, so easy was it to focus the eye upon the screen, and then again at the rooms below him. Slip on the headphones, enact the mundanity of everyday activities to a piano composition by Vlad and Capponi, all the while closing his eyes to reality.
Of course England is still green, and things happen as they happen, but away from a certain setting, on the other side of Greenwood, he reevaluates his persona. The void he had filled in himself is still a void, only it had been plastered over with paper and celluloid.
When hereallylooks back, he finds no queer love, no queer cross-dressers, no representation at all that makes it out alive or unscathed. Maybe he was never meant to see himself in these stories. And still in the world of today he is vilified. Still he is a point of contention. The way of the world then, the way of the world now: it is the same. Of similar shape. He stands at the margins.
Two weeks into his stay, he is sitting at the coffee table and mulling over an unfinished puzzle with Mrs. Flanders. He hears the clang of the letter box, a whisper of a thud in the hallway, and watches through the window as the postman rolls away with hiscart. He takes a sip of his tea and rises to collect the mail when Mrs. Flanders stirs. He insists she stay seated; he can get it. Four white envelopes and a takeaway leaflet wait for him at the base of the door. He reads The Dragon City’s Chinese menu and salivates over the picture-perfect dishes that adorn it, then hands over the remaining papers to their recipient.
“Tonight might be the night for that sweet and sour you’ve been wanting,” he says, waving the leaflet in the air. “My treat.” He has very little money left but will dip into his savings. It is the least he can do. Mrs. Flanders hasn’t taken a penny off him for room and board.
“This is one for you dear,” she says, leaning out to hand over one of the larger envelopes.
“For me?” He turns it over in his hands, sees at once the crest on the wax seal, the small scrawl of his name above the address, written at the top left. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”
He takes the stairs up to his room and rushes to break the seal. Unfurling the folded pages, he pursues the written words with a sudden shortness of breath. Here it is, the sheet of creamy letter paper, penned in that very small hand he instantly recognizes. He sits on the bed, clutches at a pillow to moor himself, and slowly, with his heartbeat pulsing in his throat, begins to take it in:
Bron,
I appreciate that the facts you’ve learned will have come as quite a shock. The first fact being that I was wed to Ms. Antoinette Vespa, a circumstance that has caused great distress to me and many in my life. The second, that the little girl you have been teaching is in fact my daughter. It has been my desire to hide this from the world, as well as many other things. You and I agree on one thing at least: I would make a terrible father.
