The Hand Against the Door

"I have known him since he was three years old. That does not mean I know what he is becoming. It means I am in a better position than most to watch." — Jameson

The dining room was cleared by half past eight.

Charles had eaten alone, as he had eaten every evening for the past three weeks with the exception of the two occasions on which Mary Louise had joined him, and on both of those occasions the conversation had touched, with the careful indirectness of two people who have been married for a long time and have developed between them a sophisticated vocabulary of implication, on the subject of Francis. Charles had not said what he thought directly. He did not need to. Mary Louise had said what she thought, which was that Francis had always been intense and that the expedition had clearly affected him and that he needed time, and Charles had listened to this with the expression he wore when he was not disagreeing with a thing but did not consider it to constitute the full account of the situation, and had returned to his food, and the conversation had moved elsewhere, and Jameson had managed the serving and the clearing with his customary invisibility and had filed everything in the interior ledger under the heading that was accumulating the most entries of any heading in the ledger at present.

Tonight Charles had eaten alone and in silence, with a copy of a construction journal open beside his plate that he had read without appearing to take in, and had finished and pushed back his chair and said, to no one in particular, that he supposed Francis would emerge when he was ready, in the tone of a man saying a thing he intends to believe and is finding the believing of it somewhat effortful. Then he had gone to his study on the upper floor, where the light was still burning at half past nine when Jameson checked.

Mary Louise had taken her supper in her sitting room and had retired early. The smell of turpentine from her brushes followed Jameson briefly into the corridor and then dissipated.

The kitchen was quiet by nine. Mrs Holt had banked the range and covered the cold cuts for tomorrow and exchanged with Jameson the brief, comprehensive look of two people who have managed a household together for long enough to conduct a full assessment of the day's situation in approximately four seconds of eye contact, and had gone to her room. Agnes had gone to hers, having spent the day in a state of disciplined incuriosity that Jameson had observed and approved of and intended to acknowledge in some appropriate fashion when the present period of household complexity had resolved itself sufficiently to make acknowledgment seem like a settled verdict rather than a provisional one.

Jameson began his final round of the ground floor at nine forty-five.

Morning room, drawing room, dining room. He moved through each with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who has done this every night for thirty years and for whom the round is not a checklist but a practice — the household returning to itself at the end of the day, each room confirmed in its proper state, each lamp extinguished in the order that was his order, each bolt and latch checked with the same hand that had checked it the night before and would check it tomorrow. There was a comfort in this that Jameson would not have described as comfort, because he was not a man who used words like comfort about the performance of his professional duties, but that was present nonetheless in the quality of attention he brought to it — the particular steadiness of a man doing what he is suited to and knows how to do in a world that has been, of late, presenting him with rather more that he does not know how to do than is entirely his preference.

He extinguished the lamp in the morning room. He straightened the antimacassar on the back of the chair nearest the window, which had shifted during the day. He drew the curtains against the dark.

In the drawing room, the fire had been out for hours and the room had the cool, formal quality of a space that is very good at being unoccupied. He moved through it efficiently, the lamp turned down and then out, the curtains drawn, the room returned to its overnight self.

The dining room was as he had left it after clearing — the table bare, the chairs in their places, the smell of the evening meal fading. He closed the sideboard and checked the window latch on the east side, which had a tendency in summer to work itself loose, and found it appropriately secured, and turned out the lamp.

He turned into the rear passage.

The library door was at the far end of it, and the line of amber light beneath it was, as it had been every night for the past three weeks, present and steady and burning with the attended quality that told him everything he needed to know about the state of its occupant. He walked toward it at his usual pace, neither hastening nor slowing, and stopped before it in the position he had been stopping in every morning and every evening — the side table to his right, the blue-and-white vase on it, the engraving of the Massachusetts coastline above.

He listened.

From within: the sound of writing. Not continuous — the intermittent, rhythmic sound of a pen moving across paper in sustained bursts with brief pauses between them, the pauses of a man thinking and then writing and then thinking again, the sound of a mind working at the pace the material required rather than the pace the hour suggested was appropriate. It was quieter than the voices he had heard through the door at various points during the day, and it was quieter than the charcoal on the wall, which he had not heard but could somehow sense in the particular quality of concentration the room had emanated since the first morning of the untouched trays. It was the quietest the room had been all day, and it was not the quiet of a man winding down.

He considered knocking.

He had knocked four times today, which was more than he ordinarily knocked in a week, and each knock had been necessary and each had been received with the particular combination of mild resistance and ultimate acceptance that characterised Francis's engagement with the ordinary requirements of the day when those requirements were interrupting something he considered more important. The morning knock with the coffee tray. The second knock, firmer, that had produced the brief exchange through the door. The afternoon entry with the visitor's card, which had produced the conversation he had been building toward for three days and which had gone, he considered, as well as such a conversation could go.

A brief knock at six o'clock with the evening tray, which had been received with the same rough instruction to leave it outside that had greeted every tray, and which was now sitting in its position on the side table with the bread eaten — he had noted this with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose investment in Mrs Holt's decision to include cold chicken and a small dish of potatoes alongside the bread had been vindicated — and the coffee drunk and the cup returned to the tray with a neatness that suggested Francis had, at some point between six and now, surfaced sufficiently from the work to eat and drink with the methodical efficiency of a man fuelling a machine rather than enjoying a meal, which was considerably better than not eating at all.

He did not knock.

He had said what he had to say this afternoon, and it had been received, and the card from the afternoon's visitor was now in the room on the other side of the door, and whatever Francis did with it was not Jameson's to determine. The correspondence on the corner of the desk was not Jameson's to open or to press. The work on the wall was not Jameson's to evaluate or to hurry. His part, at this hour of the evening, was the part he was best suited to and most certain of — the round, the lamps, the bolts, the household returned to its overnight condition — and he would perform it and leave Francis to the work and to whatever the work was in the service of, which was a question he had been asking himself with increasing frequency and answering with decreasing confidence over the course of the past three weeks.

He reached out and placed his palm flat against the library door.

He did not knock and he did not speak. He stood with his hand against the wood and felt the faint warmth of the room on the other side of it — the warmth of a space that had been occupied and heated by occupation for many hours, the lamp oil and the charcoal and the accumulated presence of a person working at full stretch — and listened to the writing, which continued its intermittent, purposeful rhythm without pause or alteration, entirely unaware of the hand on the other side of the door.

He stood there for a moment that was not a professional moment. It was the moment of a man who had carried a boy on his shoulders in the garden of this same house, who had read the same boy to sleep in the nursery upstairs on the evenings when Charles was working late and Mary Louise was occupied, who had watched that boy grow into a young man of twenty-two who had gone to Mesopotamia and come back changed in ways that Jameson did not have the framework to fully understand and was honest enough with himself to acknowledge he did not have the framework to fully understand. It was the moment of a man who was, within the strict and maintained boundaries of his professional formation, concerned. Not alarmed. Not convinced that what was happening in the room behind the door was wrong or dangerous or beyond recovery. Simply concerned, in the way that a person is concerned about someone they have known for twenty years who is doing something that the person cannot entirely account for and cannot entirely dismiss.

He removed his hand from the door.

He straightened his jacket. He adjusted his position to the one that was his professional position, the position from which he conducted the final round of the ground floor of Ashwood Manor every night, and he turned and walked back along the rear passage toward the entrance hall.

The hall table stood in its position beneath the mirror, bearing the day's accumulated correspondence in the neat stack that Jameson had maintained through the day's various disruptions — the morning post, the afternoon delivery, the card that had arrived with the gentleman caller and that was now, he knew, inside the library and no longer his concern. The stack was not large. Most of it was the ordinary correspondence of a household and a professional practice — a note for Charles from his surveyor, a letter for Mary Louise with a Concord postmark that was almost certainly from her sister, two circulars that would go in the waste paper basket in the morning.

On top of the stack was the envelope.

Jameson stopped beside the table and looked at it, as he had looked at it that morning when the post had arrived and it had been on top of the pile then as it was on top of the pile now, having been moved and replaced in the course of the day's management of the hall table without ever being opened or transferred to the library with the other items he had placed on the corner of Francis's desk. He had not put it with the others deliberately, and he was honest enough with himself to acknowledge the deliberateness. He had put the everyday correspondence on the desk because it was his function to ensure correspondence reached its recipient. He had left this one on the hall table because — because it was different, and the difference had been apparent from the first moment he had seen it, and he had not been ready, until he had a clearer sense of what he was dealing with in the room behind the library door, to introduce it into that room.

He was clearer now.

The envelope was cream, of a weight and texture that belonged to a higher register of correspondence than the everyday post — the kind of paper that announced, before it was opened, that its sender considered the communication important enough to warrant the material expense of saying so. The handwriting on the front was precise and architectural, each letter formed with the deliberate care of someone for whom handwriting was a considered act rather than a functional one. The seal on the back was plain wax, dark, without a crest or device, pressed with a flat instrument rather than a signet ring, which told Jameson, reading it as he read everything, that whoever had sent this letter was either without the conventional social markers of a seal or had chosen, as a matter of preference, not to use them.

The letter was addressed to Mr Francis Charles Killerton, Ashwood Manor, Boston, Massachusetts, in the hand that Jameson had looked at that morning and looked at now with the same quality of attention, and beneath the name, in the same hand but slightly smaller, the words: Personal. For the attention of the addressee only.

Jameson looked at the envelope for a long moment.

He was not going to open it. This went without saying. The instruction on the front, which was not an unusual instruction on personal correspondence, was in this instance entirely redundant, because Jameson did not open correspondence that was not his to open, had not done so in thirty years of professional practice, and was not going to begin now regardless of the quality of the paper or the precision of the hand or the absence of a crest on the seal or any of the other properties of this particular envelope that had caused him to note it with an attention somewhat beyond the ordinary.

He picked it up.

He held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it, which was the weight of several folded sheets rather than one — a letter of substance, then, not a brief note or a calling card formality. He looked at the postmark, which he had examined that morning and examined now to confirm what he remembered: Boston, the previous day's date, sent from within the city.

He put the envelope back on the hall table.

He squared it against the edge of the table with the same precise adjustment he gave the blue-and-white vase on the side table in the rear passage. He stepped back. He looked at the hall as a whole — the mirror, the table, the lamp on the table burning with its low evening flame, the correspondence in its stack with the cream envelope on top of it, the staircase rising in its familiar curve to the upper floor where Charles's study light was still visible under the door at the top.

He turned out the hall lamp, leaving only the single low light he always left at the foot of the stair for the household's use through the night.

He went upstairs.

In the morning, before breakfast, he would place the envelope on the corner of the desk in the library with the rest of the correspondence, and whatever Francis did with it after that was Francis's to determine. But the morning was the morning, and tonight was tonight, and what Jameson had done today, within the terms of his professional obligations and slightly beyond them, was sufficient for one day, and the rest of it he was leaving to settle until the household was fresh and the July light was back and the work behind the library door had had another night to run its course toward wherever it was running.

He reached the top of the stairs. Charles's study door, still lit beneath it, still quiet — working late, or sitting with his thoughts, or both, which with Charles had always been more or less the same thing. Mary Louise's sitting room, dark and still.

Jameson went to his room, which faced east, and undressed in the dark, and lay down, and listened to the house settle into its overnight quiet around him — the creak of a board cooling somewhere in the east wing, the distant sound of the fountain in the garden reaching him faintly through the closed window, the particular deep stillness of a large house in the small hours.

Below him, in the library, the lamp burned on.