Chapter 14: What’s His

He walked home turning the club over, the way he turned it over most evenings now. The young cousin had been muttering again — that no one was listening, that there came a point where good men had to be seen to act and not merely to grumble, that a thing ignored long enough stopped being a grievance and started being a weakness. As long as no one was hurt by it, of course. The cousin was always careful to say that. As long as no one was hurt. Merko liked him for saying it; it was the mark of a sound man, that he kept that always in front of him, and Merko kept it in front of himself too, and was comforted.

The cousin’s man had been about as well — the quiet careful one who did the cousin’s careful errands — going from one of them to the next with a word about their households. Watch your servants, was the burden of it. A slave hears everything and forgets nothing, he’d said, and the still ones, the biddable ones, the ones you’d swear were furniture, those are the ones to watch hardest, for stillness is not the same as emptiness and a man who cannot tell the difference will hang for it. Sound advice, Merko had thought, and had meant to act on it, and had, in his way.

And then, somewhere along the wall, his mind turned to a different thing, and he let it, because it had been turning that way for a day or two and he had decided to stop pretending it wasn’t.

It was a week since the funeral. A week and a little. And he found, examining himself honestly, that he was beginning to bear it — that the great hole of her was still there but that he could walk past it now without falling in, and that the parts of a man that go on regardless of grief had begun, quietly, to go on. He had needs. There was no shame in saying it to himself. He was a man in his prime who had lost his wife, and the needs did not know she was dead, and went on asking. Was it too soon? He turned that over honestly too, and decided it was not — that a week was little, yes, but that no one who had ever buried a spouse would think the worse of him for it, that these were the oldest needs there were and the most forgivable, and that grief and appetite had always shared a bed and always would. Anyone would understand. He was sure of it. He stopped being troubled by it about the time he reached his own door.

The girl had dinner ready, as she always did. She looked up when he came in. “Good evening, master. Dinner’s ready when you are.”

He looked at her. He had been, he realised, looking at her for a week or two now in a way he had not used to, since the bath, since he’d been surprised into seeing she was worth the seeing. He looked at her now and did not look away as quickly as he once would have, and she met it for a moment and then dropped her eyes the proper way, and he went in to dinner.

It was good, as her dinners were always good. Partway through it the thought that had walked home with him put up its head again, and he found himself saying, easily, “You should have some new dresses. Better ones. That shift’s seen better days.” Which was true, and was also not the whole of what he meant, because the whole of what he meant was a thing a man did not say aloud even in his own dining room — that the shift was a sack, and a sack was the wrong thing to put on what he had lately decided she was, and that there were better uses for the shape of her than hiding it. He did not say that. He said the shift had seen better days.