Baroque, Karl, and the Jeffries

"The most dangerous thing you can do in a conversation is fill a silence that's doing perfectly good work on its own."

We sat like that for a while.

I did not count the minutes. I had stopped counting minutes some weeks ago, which was either a symptom of the cancer or a reasonable response to it, and I had decided not to distinguish between the two.

Sarah's hand was warm in mine. Her breathing had steadied — not back to normal, nothing so tidy as that, but the worst of it had passed through her and she was sitting with what remained, which was the only thing anyone could ever do with grief. You waited for it to find its level. You did not rush it and you did not perform your way around it and you kept hold of whatever was being held out to you.

I looked at our hands on the table. Hers, young and capable, the hands of a woman who had spent years doing physical work in difficult conditions. Mine, which had stopped looking entirely like mine some time ago.

The music came through from the living room. The lamp held its warmth over the table and the cold plates and the overseasoned evidence of Sarah's love.

I squeezed her hand once.

"Come and sit with me," I said.

She helped me to the couch with the careful steadiness she had developed over the past year — a choreography we had arrived at through practice and necessity, neither of us having discussed it, both of us simply accommodating what was required. I appreciated this about Sarah. She managed the practical dimensions of my decline without making them the subject of conversation, which was exactly how I wished them managed.

I settled into my corner. The cushions had long since formed their opinion of me and received me accordingly.

Sarah retrieved the blanket from the recliner — the knitted one, dusky rose and ivory, worn thin at the edges in the places I had repaired so many times the repairs were older than the original stitching in some sections. She draped it across my lap and tucked the edges with a care that I received without comment and filed in the place I kept things worth keeping.

"Thank you, Sarah," I said.

She kicked off her boots and curled up beside me — knees drawn in, her head finding my lap with the ease of long habit, settling there with a small exhale that contained everything the evening had cost her. I felt the weight of her, the warmth of it. Familiar in the way that certain weights became familiar — not something you noticed anymore so much as something you would notice the absence of.

My hand found her hair.

I had been doing this since she was nine years old, when the nightmares came and she would appear in my doorway at two in the morning saying nothing, requiring nothing except to be in the same room as another person who was not asleep. I had learned then that Sarah's grief did not ask for words. It asked for proximity. For the specific comfort of a hand moving through hair in the dark, steadily and without agenda.

My hand remembered, even when the rest of me was making its various complaints about the proceedings.

We sat in the quiet of it. The music from the radio moved through the room unhurried, strings and piano, something I had been listening to for forty years and which had never once let me down. Outside, the Derwent was dark. The building around us gave off its familiar evening sounds — the corridor, the distant hum of the facility conducting its night routines, the particular quality of a place that never entirely slept.

Sarah's breathing had found its rhythm. The detective had put herself away somewhere. What remained in my lap was simply the girl I had raised, and I stroked her hair and I thought about nothing in particular and I let the evening be what it was.

Then I thought — with the deliberate pleasure of someone who has been saving something — about this morning.

She had been making quite the noise.

I had held it all day. Through Luke and Thelma and the key and the cold tea and the pasta and the cancer said aloud at a dinner table. I had held it with the patience of someone who understood that timing was the whole art of it, and now here we were, and the moment had arrived in the manner that good moments did — quietly, without announcing itself.

"So, when do I get to meet him?" I asked.

I felt rather than saw the response — a small shift in the quality of her stillness, the particular alertness of someone who has just realised a conversation they were not prepared for has begun.

"Meet who?" she said.

I allowed a brief pause in the stroking of her hair. A single beat of consideration.

"This dream man of yours who makes you moan so much," I said.

"Jane!" The colour arrived in her face with commendable speed. I did not need to see it — I could hear it in the precise register of the protest, the particular pitch of mortification that I had been provoking in this young woman at intervals since she was a teenager and which had never once lost its entertainment value. "It was only once!"

"Mmm," I said. "Only once that you remember."

She shook her head against my lap with a helpless sound that was trying very hard not to be a laugh and was not entirely succeeding. I resumed the hair stroking. I looked at the middle distance with the expression of someone who has made their point and is prepared to let it rest there at its full height.

The silence that followed had a different quality to the earlier ones — lighter, the grief not gone but shifted slightly, making room for something else to exist alongside it. I had always believed this was what humour was actually for. Not the avoidance of difficult things but the proof that difficult things did not get to have the entire room.

"His name is Karl," she said, after a moment.

She said it with the careful quality of something being set down — not reluctantly, exactly, but with the attention of someone who understood the weight of the act. I noted this.

"Just Karl?" I asked.

"Just Karl."

I did not press. There was nothing in her voice that invited it, and I had spent ninety-two years learning the precise difference between a silence that wanted to be opened and one that wanted to be respected. I rested my hand against her shoulder. Whatever Karl was — and I suspected, from the quality of this morning and the quality of this silence, that he was considerably more complicated than two words — would find its way out in its own time.

She would tell me when she was ready. She always had.

I had not expected the subject to change quite so soon.

"Hey, do you know the Jeffries?" she asked.

The name arrived in the room and I received it.

I had spent the afternoon sitting across a small table from Thelma Rose, who had spent sixty-three years as Thelma Jeffries, who had given birth to a Jeffries, who had managed the Jeffries household and the Jeffries secrets and the Jeffries inheritance and its accumulated wreckage with a steadiness that I had watched up close and considered one of the more remarkable performances of the twentieth century.

I let my brow furrow. I sifted, visibly, through the accumulated decades of acquaintances and neighbours and community members and all the countless people who populated a long life in a small city.

"The Jeffries?" I said. "Doesn't ring any bells."

"Louise Jeffries," Sarah prompted, watching — I could feel it — for a flicker.

I closed my eyes. I let my lips move slightly, the performance of someone genuinely searching. I gave it the appropriate duration.

"Oh — do you mean Louise Greyson?"

"Possibly," Sarah said carefully. "She has a brother called Jamie Greyson."

"Yes! That's it!" I let the recognition arrive with the natural energy of someone who has just located a memory that had been temporarily misfiled. "Your mum was good friends with Louise's mother. Before she died. And I think your dad used to work with her father too. I forget his name now."

"I don't know it either," Sarah said.

I felt her processing it — the connection to her parents, the threads of it pulling through her. This was the thing about a small city and a long life. The connections were always there. You only needed someone to ask the right question.

I waited.

"Come to think of it..." I said.

I let it drift, the way thoughts drifted when you were ninety-two and the day had been long. Then I came back to it, as though assembling the pieces idly rather than with the precision I was actually applying.

"Jamie comes to visit me, you know. Every few months or so."

Sarah's head lifted from my lap.

"Really?"

"Lovely young man," I said. "Always has time for a proper chat. Brings me books, sometimes. We talk about music, mostly. He has excellent taste in classical composers. Very knowledgeable about the Baroque period, which you don't find often in young people these days."

I kept my hand moving through her hair at the same unhurried pace.

Sarah had asked about the Jeffries. Then Louise. Then Jamie. I did not know what she was moving toward — she had not said, and I had not asked, and she had the particular quality of someone who was following a thread without yet knowing where it led. Or knowing where it led and not yet being prepared to say.

What I did know was that Jamie Greyson was Luke's partner. Had been for the better part of a decade. Which made him connected, through Luke, to me — in the way that everything in this particular web connected eventually back to the same small set of people, if you followed it far enough.

Sarah did not know about Luke. Did not know about Heather. Did not know that the grandmother stroking her hair this evening had sat across a table from Luke Smith this very afternoon and watched him leave without a key she needed back.

I had no reason to change any of that tonight.

I kept my voice at the temperature of mild fond recollection and my hand at its steady pace and I said nothing further on the subject of Jamie Greyson, because nothing further needed to be said and because I had spent ninety-two years understanding that the most dangerous thing you could do in a conversation was fill a silence that was doing perfectly good work on its own.

I could feel Sarah beside me — the stillness of someone whose instincts had come awake inside a room where she had decided not to bring them. I felt her wanting to ask something further. I felt her hold it back.

She knew how many of these evenings remained. I knew she knew, because I knew it too, and we were not so different in how we carried that — quietly, close to the chest, without making it the subject of every room we entered together.

I was glad of it tonight.

The timer went off.

The sound crossed the room with the cheerful indifference of an appliance entirely uninvested in the proceedings.

"Oh," I said, with the mild resignation of routine. "Time for my bedtime pills."