The men take longer to crack, but not much. Christmas Eve afternoon, when her friends from the village have joined them for an Open House, Jules comes upon the sound of a man weeping in one of the upstairs bathrooms over a musical murmur unmistakably her husband’s. Frank was easy, though. Architects are essentially artists; drawing makes you vulnerable. She is sure he won’t get Phil. Surgeons are emotionally immune, are they not? But a few hours later, Phil opts to accompany Logan on the late-night dog walk and returns undeniably altered. They help each other off with their coats, colluders in intimacy.
Jules, however, cannot be drawn out. There is nothing inside her to draw out. For how can you draw out an emptiness? She is all shell. Regrown inside her is the same gap Finlay identified when she was with Simon, the gap he had once filled with his exceptional attentions as an invading army will station battalions in the no man’s land of an ungoverned neighbouring country. But now he cannot fill it, because he has caused it; by his nearness to some gentleness that has her feeling like a beast crashing through the undergrowth. Must all her men go this way? Turn into saints?
Overnight, a storm rattles in out of Russia; a bitter wind in the mood for breaking things. By some miracle the roof tiles cling to their battens and the kitchen range stays lit. It’s sherry and chocolate for breakfast, and a smattering of presents under the tree to be unwrapped in the one-by-one way he insists upon. He opens from her a boxed set of The Vigil; a series he’d said he thought was okay three years ago. Thoughtful, he says, with no trace of sarcasm to suggest he knows she ordered it online in a last-minute panic, paying extra for delivery. He suggests she open hers in private but she doesn’t take him seriously. It’s flat and wide, clearly a picture. Probably something awful and eco from the village gallery. So despite his warning she opens it in front of the cheery roomful. It is a digital montage of photos of her dead brother. Her brother waving at her through the long years since his ashes were scattered on the top of Truleigh Hill. Her brother as a boy. Her brother with his arm around her at a family gathering. Some of these photos she has never seen before. Bastard, she thinks. Tears.
How did you do this? she asks.
It took a while to put together, he says. I found a company online that prints onto canvas.
She doesn’t mean the practicalities. She means the looking straight into her heart to find what would touch her. Too much, as it happens. She has to leave the room. It means more to her than anything he has ever given her.