Page 40 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“Eat up, lad,” Mrs. Ferris said, returning to the long kitchen table where Georgie and Simon sat at one end. “There’ll be more where that came from at supper.”
When Simon finally finished, they bundled into their topcoats and headed for the sea. Georgie cast a look over his shoulder towards Lawrence’s tower, but the curtains were drawn.
The door flew open, slamming into the wall behind it with a bang that shattered Lawrence’s nerves.
“You are not dead, I see.” Georgie glared at Lawrence. “Or indisposed. I hardly know whether to be relieved or disappointed.”
Lawrence nearly said that Georgie looked neither relieved nor disappointed, but furious. Instead he raised an eyebrow and returned to his book.
“In the event that you wondered, your child arrived alive and well. No,” he said, as if struck by an insight, “wellwould be an exaggeration. He’s half-starved. Do they not feed children at these schools?”
Lawrence doubted that Harrow starved its students, and recalled Percy returning home for holidays as stout as ever. “I hardly know. I didn’t go to school. My father didn’t see any purpose in educating a mad second son.”
That seemed to take some of the wind out of Georgie’s sails, because his expression softened for a moment. “Is that so? The more I hear about your father, the sorrier I am that he’s dead, because I’d dearly like to kill him myself.” And from the hard gleam in Georgie’s eyes, Lawrence didn’t doubt that he meant it.
Thinking to steer this conversation away from his failure to attend Simon’s arrival, and also because he liked seeing Georgie rise to his defense, Lawrence said, “He was afraid that my madness would embarrass the family.”
“As far as I can tell, your father and brother did a damned fine job of embarrassing the family without your help, but you’re keeping up the Browne tradition of appalling behavior with today’s performance.”
So much for trying to change the topic. “About that—”
“I had a place set for you at dinner. Did you even wonder who would dine with Simon if you weren’t there?”
Of course he had not. He had other things to worry about besides dinner arrangements. “Judging by your attire, I’d say you had dinner with the child, which seems only right, seeing as how you were the one who insisted on his coming here.” Lawrence would have liked to linger over the sight of Georgie in narrowly tailored evening clothes. “I’ve decided not to see him.”
“I gathered as much.” Georgie shook his head, his lips pressed into a tight line. “It’s a cruel plan.”
“What would be cruel would be for him to meet me and form an attachment.”
“Rubbish.”
“I’m not right in the head—”
“Oh, I see we’re having this conversation again.”
“I’m not, Georgie. I know it. You know it too. I don’t want Simon”—he stuttered a bit over the name—“to come to know me, only to watch me get worse.”
“Why do you think you’re going to get worse?” Georgie perched on the arm of the sofa, and Lawrence tipped his head against the back of the seat to better see him. “Has something happened?”
Only that he was petrified by the idea of leaving his study, or meeting new people, or being assaulted by too much noise, or really doing anything that took him out of the cocoon he had created for himself. But Georgie was already all too aware of those deficits, and remained unconvinced. “My father got worse and worse until he killed himself. Percy . . . ” He snorted. “He started out bad enough, and I hardly need to tell you how things were at the end.”
“And you have nothing to do with either of them. I’m bored of this conversation.” He languidly extended a hand to examine his fingernails, such a transparent attempt to feign indifference that Lawrence nearly smiled. Only the slight furrow between his eyebrows betrayed that this was a topic that he even cared about in the slightest. Lawrence wanted to pull him close and kiss that wrinkle. “We’ve had it at least twice before. You aren’t mad, and even if you were it wouldn’t be in the same way as your abominable brother and father. You aren’t living their lives, and you don’t need to atone for their sins.”
“That’s not what’s happening here,” Lawrence protested. “I know that I have nothing to atone for.” As he spoke, he knew it to be the truth. Whatever the state of his mind, he wasn’t like his brother or father. This knowledge had been creeping up on him for weeks, and now he had no choice but to confront the possibility that he would not wind up like either of them. He might have an entire life stretching before him, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
Georgie regarded him with a shrewdness that made Lawrence feel that his thoughts were as visible as a specimen in a glass jar. “I wonder what will happen when you realize you aren’t mad. So much of your life hangs from that one supposition. It’s like the story you were telling me about that Italian fellow who thought electricity was inside the dead frog—a lot of his science was rubbish because of that one error. What will you do with yourself when you grasp that your mind is only different, not deranged?”
This so closely mirrored Lawrence’s own realization that he was momentarily startled. So instead he tried to turn the tables. “You won’t be here to find out what happens then, will you? You’ll have finished your business at Penkellis and moved on.”
Georgie opened his mouth, and for a moment Lawrence thought he would confide in him. Instead he slid off the arm of the sofa and swung a leg over Lawrence’s lap, straddling him and looking him levelly in the eye. “I will always be glad to have known you, Lawrence.” He brought a hand to Lawrence’s jaw and stroked his beard. “I want you to remember that. When I’m not here, I want you to know that wherever I am, however we part, I’ll be better for having . . . ” He hesitated, then touched his own heart before bringing his hand to rest on Lawrence’s chest. “For having had you as a friend,” he said.
Lawrence took hold of Georgie’s hand and trapped it on his chest, partly so Georgie could feel the way his heart pounded, partly because he hadn’t the faintest idea how else to respond. All he knew was that he needed to hold Georgie close and keep him safe and spend the rest of eternity enumerating his every quality. He realized with disorienting certainty that this was love. Judging by the bleak tenderness in Georgie’s dark eyes, he knew it too. But what they had felt so fragile and out of place, built of blown glass on unstable ground in the middle of a hurricane. Beautiful, but never meant to last.
All Lawrence could think to say was, “Stay, then. Don’t leave.”
Georgie wriggled his hand free and took hold of Lawrence’s shoulders. “I don’t stay,” he said slowly. “It’s the nature of my line of work.”
Confess, he wanted to say.Tell me the truth. Tell me why you’re here, so I can know that I love you despite it, and you can know it too.Instead he raised an eyebrow and said, “Being a secretary, you mean.”
