A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(32)
“I said no such thing. If Wilkes infers as such, that’s hardly my fault.”
“Holmes.”
“I just told DI Sadiq what I’m doing,” I protested. “How could I be doing anything wrong?”
Watson was always this way, some strange jumble of accelerator and brake pedal, and I never knew what line he’d drawn for himself in the morning. This spring, when we were writing back and forth across the Atlantic, I’d pointed out that it didn’t make logical sense to be fine with breaking and entering but less fine with, say, my secretly texting with his then-girlfriend to check in on his well-being; at that, he’d added “emailing Holmes” to the list of things he was decidedly not okay with, and went silent for a week.
Less often, now, he made excuses for me, was less interested in redrawing his moral landscape so that he could keep me slotted in some Edenic garden, someplace where I would always be the hero. Or the villain. It felt now that we had more of a sliding scale by which to measure the other, as was only fair. Some days I could keep myself together quite well. And other days I would do anything in the name of expediency.
“I need to prepare for my tutorial,” he said, passing a hand over his hair. “And—don’t you have your poetry tutorial at one?”
I did. And what I hadn’t told him yet was that I wasn’t planning to go. That I’d made the decision that morning in the kitchen, spreading butter on endless pieces of bread while he slept in the other room.
“I’ll walk back with you,” I told him. “The tutor said it’s fine if I’m a little late.”
Twelve
AFTER I DEPOSITED WATSON AT THE LIBRARY—I DIDN’T kiss him good-bye, it was too much and too light out and I already felt ill about lying—I picked up a sausage roll from a little shop outside the gates and ate it slowly as I walked, running through my monologue in my head.
How should I your true-love know
From another one?
By his cockle bat and staff
And his sandal shoon—
It was one of a series of nursery rhymes that Ophelia sang—laughing, crying—after her father’s death at her beloved Hamlet’s hand. Nursery rhymes, and a song about a girl losing her virginity, and the obsessive wishing of goodnight. Goodnight, ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight . . .
If I had disdain for her character, it was in the way Shakespeare used her: a weathervane for everyone else’s wind. She is told by her father to betray Hamlet, and does, and when Hamlet shortly after loses his mind—something, I might add, which is entirely his own problem—Ophelia blames herself. Hamlet will not marry her; he will instead murder her father, and she blames herself for that too.
Later, she climbs a willow tree, falls from it, and drowns, as one apparently does.
Though I knew a bit about Shakespeare, it wasn’t as though I had all that much experience with theater. When I was a child, Leander had taken me to see My Fair Lady in the West End, and during a warm, languid summer when my father had been inexplicably even-keeled, we’d watched the Kenneth Branagh film adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing and Othello and As You Like It and Hamlet. I was ten, and I’d been taken with Ophelia, all red curls and white dresses and then, at the end, lovely even in her straightjacket as she writhed on the black-and-white tiled floor.
My father had seen something in my expression, some flicker of fascination, and he had reached out to touch my shoulder. “She isn’t a girl,” he’d said gently. “She’s a bad idea.”
Perhaps he’d meant to say she’d been poorly drawn, or characterized. Or perhaps he’d meant exactly what it sounded like. That summer, as I’d known it, only lasted a few weeks longer. We’d make it through Love’s Labour’s Lost and half of some made-for-television Macbeth, and then one night my father wasn’t in the living room when I went down after supper. Some small new indignity had driven the tension back into my father’s body, and he sat like a tensile coil in his study through the waning days of August.
I had looked out the window, and dreamed.
A bad idea.
I arrived at the St. Genesius theater a few minutes before two, even though my audition time wasn’t until much later. The heavy doors were propped open for the occasion; the sun stretched in long, slim branches of light onto the wine-colored carpet.
I crept in on cat feet. On the stage, a man was pacing to and fro, calling out directions to someone just offstage. A pair of high curtains began to rise, abruptly seized, then lowered all at once. Someone cursed loudly from the wings. Laughter kicked up from just below the stage, a chorus of it, and I refocused my eyes to look.
The Dramatics Society, all forty-odd of them, clustered together in the first few rows. They leaned on each other’s shoulders, bent forward to whisper in each other’s ears; their bags were flung over seatbacks and left to spill out in the aisles. They were high school–aged, all of them, bright like peacocks, and I heard Americans and Irish and a boy speaking excitedly with a Parisian spin on his words, gesturing with his hands. His friend nodding, slicing an apple with a sharp little knife, sharing the pieces of it between them.
As I walked down the aisle, not a single one turned their head to look at me, though my boots were making more noise than I’d intended. I felt unaccountably self-conscious. Why on earth was I fussed? I didn’t want them to look at me anyway.