Chapter Text
February 1946
It was a blustery evening, and Siegfried Farnon sat at his desk hunched over a shocking amount of disarray. A thin piece of carbon paper was in his hand and one thought ran through his mind:
Three quid for just one month’s worth of gauze?
The war was over but no one felt it in their wallets, yet. Business was slow and prices of supplies continued to rise. Siegfried sighed, pushed his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
He was tired and ornery and wanted nothing to do with anyone. He’d spent the past forty-eight hours avoiding human contact, taking any and all farm calls, even night ones to James’s boundless delight (and Tristan’s, too, now that he was back on board). The only reason he was dealing with invoices now was because he’d run out of things to do other than stew, or perform endless pirouettes in his mind. Paperwork was as good a distraction as any.
As whenever he was in a foul mood, the other residents of Skeldale gave him a wide berth. Let Siegfried run himself out, he could practically hear them thinking. Like he was some sort of toy. But he refused to confide in anyone what had brought on his latest discontent: he’d finally told Dorothy it wasn’t going to work.
It could never have worked.
He’d known it the first time they’d stepped out after Christmas, when their conversation had skirted anything of importance. There was really no other way it could have gone—they’d barely known each other and it wasn’t as if they could have just jumped into So you’ve lost a spouse too, I hear, how did that go for you?—but it had grated all the same. Dorothy’s had not been the voice he wanted to hear, nor were her lips the ones he’d wanted to kiss at the end of the night.
He’d done it anyway.
It hadn’t been awful, in truth. Dorothy was a beautiful woman, and charming. He knew a flatterer when he saw one because he was the same. He’d taken out the old Siegfried, dusted him off and deployed him quite well in the years since he and Dorothy had first met.
The problem was the old Siegfried was a role. And he was so tired of playing. A man did not get to be nearly fifty years old without some clarity, and Siegfried had no interest in being who he used to be or even who he wished he were. He wanted to be only himself, the man he was now, with no effort other than the one to better himself for the benefit of those around him.
There was only one person with which he could do that.
Not that he’d told Dorothy any of this. He’d been as vague as possible with her. She had seemed surprised but not particularly hurt, although who knew with women, sometimes.
Now that it was over he supposed he should have been relieved but a kernel of frustration remained, a resentment that he’d had the experience at all. He’d spent the last two days looking for a place to put it.
Through his closed office door he heard the front door of the house open, a few words murmured, and the door closed again. The usual chilly draft blew in at his feet. He looked at his watch. Quarter past six. Surgery had been closed for nearly two hours and there was nearly an hour until dinner. He eyed his empty cup. He could use another now.
The distinctive shuffle of his stalwart housekeeper approached. Her smart, two-knuckled rap.
“Come,” he said absently.
Audrey entered perhaps a touch less briskly than she normally would, and Siegfried stubbornly resisted his body’s deep-seated instinct to relax around her warm presence. Tonight her piercing beauty pulled at him as always, but it was no balm.
She was the architect of all of it.
“Second post for you.”
After he took the handful of letters, silent as a monument, Audrey lingered a moment. She was far too efficient for that not to be significant. Every second of her day, every movement was rationed and utilized to its fullest; until the day’s end, that is, when she unwound so beautifully.
“I were sorry to hear,” she said, in that halting way she had when broaching delicate subjects, “that you and Dorothy decided to end things.”
Siegfried clenched his jaw and fixed his stubborn gaze on the floor between his desk and Audrey’s shoes. So she knew. The two women were close; it had just been a matter of time. He wasn’t sure he could bear Audrey’s thoughts on the situation.
What the hell had gripped him at Christmas? He’d given Dorothy all that claptrap about missing her while she’d been in Malta when nothing could have been further from the truth. The only reason they’d had a flirtation in the first place years ago was because she’d had one foot out of the country already. She had posed no real threat to him.
He had just been trying to do what Audrey had told him to. How had she put it: What if you miss what’s right under your nose?
Indeed.
She hadn’t even seemed happy for him once he’d done her bidding and stepped out with the blasted woman. A faint line had taken up permanent residence between Audrey’s brows, as if something about the arrangement troubled her. Siegfried was too attuned to her moods not to notice it. So on top of everything else he felt he’d come between two old friends.
Audrey stood in the doorway, waiting for some kind of reaction. It did not occur to Siegfried that she might simply be offering support. To his current mood her words were provocative. He had a choice—every single moment was a choice, Siegfried knew that, he just didn’t manage his own choices very well—between letting this continue to fester under his skin, and lancing it right in Audrey’s face.
She had caught him at a bad moment.
He huffed bitterly and said, head bent over his mound of invoices, “I’m sure you were.”
There was a breathless pause. Audrey knew dangerous territory when she saw it. She had a choice, too.
“What does that mean?”
Her voice held an unmistakable challenge. Lines drawn in the sand, then. Siegfried felt the rush of oncoming battle. He looked up at her with glittering eyes.
“It must be disappointing that your efforts to fix me have failed once again.”
She crossed her slim arms in front of her body and frowned at him.
“I weren’t trying to fix you.”
“Oh, bollocks.” He removed his reading glasses and tossed them on the desk. “You’ve been doing it for years.”
“All I have ever wanted—”
“Find Mr. Farnon female company, isn’t that it? Top order of the day, put the broken man back together so you can feel you’ve done your duty by me? No matter if I want said company or not.”
“That’s not fair,” she said.
Siegfried saw the wounded look in her eyes. A voice inside him warned he was going about this the wrong way, but he was gathering quite the head of steam.
“Fair? Fair?” He gesticulated wildly. “You’re one to talk about fair. You make me feel like a bull at market!”
“I’ve—”
“And every time you push me and it goes nowhere I end up feeling guilty about it! As if I’ve disappointed you, when it really should be the other way round. Even now I find myself compelled to explain that I tried my best! It’s ridiculous. Why should I feel beholden to your efforts to engineer my future?”
This was an exaggeration, of course. Before Dorothy’s return Audrey had not pushed him on the subject of women, not for years. And even when she had it had been relatively gentle. But right now, inside the pressure of Siegfried’s tumultuous mind, her occasional nudges of him towards monogamy melded into one long, unbroken stretch of disapproval.
Audrey had had enough. She let her arms fall to her sides and leaned forward slightly. All that was missing was a finger pointing in his face.
“Were you going to let me speak or not? A quick tongue, you have, but a wooden ear!”
Siegfried bit said tongue but the snappish energy that had taken hold of him had a life of its own. He fairly shook with it.
“You’ve no right to cast me as a villain,” Audrey said defiantly. “I’ve always been your friend first. Friends look out for each other. They help each other.”
“Ah yes, of course! Our friendship!” Siegfried cried with childish sarcasm, and they were getting very close to the heart of it now. “The one you hold so dear you were willing to throw it away?”
Offense emanated from Audrey’s every pore. “I beg your pardon?”
It wasn’t the sting of unrequited love that burned through Siegfried now, not consciously. He knew Audrey didn’t love him. He’d always known that. How could she? The idea was laughable. There was nothing but inequality between them: she was strength and wit and warm care, down to her bones—the most inspiring woman he’d ever met—and he was just a shell of those things. A puppet, grasping at his own strings in a desperate attempt to move properly.
But Siegfried was still roiled by the bitter conviction that Audrey should have known better. She had held their friendship so cheap she’d risked it for a pittance. His disappointment in her consumed him.
“Thrusting me upon the lovely Dorothy! Did you give any thought to how that was going to work, exactly?” He walked his fingers in the air in a scathing pantomime. “What if the little dolls you had arranged ended up toddling down the aisle, then? What would have become of you? You’d have been happy on the periphery, making us tea and watching us play bloody Scrabble?”
His chest heaved in crescendo and when he saw her face fall—when he saw that she would not, in fact, have been happy with that—there was no relief, only the triumph of having been proven right. It led him too far.
“You might call me a romantic—”
”I never called—” she protested, attempting to talk over him.
“—but better that,” he said, delivering a trembling coup de grâce, “than unfeeling.”
Audrey reared back slightly, as if avoiding a blow. Her hand flew up to the door jamb and held on, fingers white at the tips.
“I am not unfeeling!” she said hoarsely.
“Yes, you are!” he shot back. He could not stop now, could not grind himself out of gear and see that he was hurting her. He could only focus on the road ahead, the destination of her admitting she had hurt him by inviting an intruder into their lives. “If you weren’t you would have seen I was perfectly happy! I have everything I need right here.”
He raised his hands, palm-up, and all of Skeldale rested in them. Our family. Our life.
The corners of Audrey’s mouth pulled down and hinted at the edges of her anger. Although she was fond of handing out hard truths she was not usually one to engage in a true argument immediately; she would draw out the other party, determine the seriousness of the situation and then wait for heads to cool before dispensing her final wisdom. But then, Siegfried was not usually hurtful. They were both in new territory.
“I don’t recall smashing your face together with Dorothy’s at the Drovers,” she said, with more vitriol than was perhaps necessary. “That were your decision.”
Siegfried’s face flushed with the shame of being called out so roughly—and rightly—by so proper a woman.
“And if you were so happy,” she went on, her voice rising in pitch, “what were all that moping about for? All that nonsense about finding your other half?”
It was her disdain that finally broke him. When he’d told her about Aristophanes he had been showing her the little pearl of hope at the center of his heart, a vision of what he wanted more than anything, and apparently she had found it so ridiculous she was willing to bring it up in an argument and spit on it.
“I was trying to tell you I’d already found it!”
Damn.
They both went very still, immediately aware of what he meant. Siegfried felt like the lead on a very dangerous animal had just slipped from his grasp. He turned back to his desk, looked at the papers strewn every which way. At the mess of his life. The wind had gone out of him.
“I’d already found it.”
Audrey didn’t move or speak—Siegfried wasn’t sure she was breathing—and he could not bear to look at her face. To see her horror or her disgust. Or worse, her betrayal. He stood and brushed past her, grabbed his keys from the hook and ripped off the top sheet of paper from the pad next to the telephone. There was probably some task written on it that could serve as an excuse to run. Then he strode through the kitchen to the car.
*
Siegfried stayed away from the house far longer than he needed to. Once he’d brusquely interrupted Phyllis Dalby’s dinner and seen to her stirks, he’d driven the long way home despite ongoing petrol rationing and lingered in the shed for a while. The chatter of several rabbits provided pleasant accompaniment to his sense of impending doom.
Audrey would know he was home; the Rover was impossible to hide. On any other day she might have come to check on him in the shed. Siegfried knew she wouldn’t tonight.
He slumped in the shed’s lone rickety chair, eyes far away. Their conversation had been disastrous. Not only had he behaved like a child, he’d been cruel. How could he have called her unfeeling? And he had admitted far more than he should have. There was a good chance he had set in motion the destruction of everything he held dear. A sickly feeling filled him, dread and panic in a terrible dance.
Finally he decided there was no chance of anyone else still being awake. With a glance at his wristwatch, he approached the back door: 12:22.
He deposited his coat and boots just inside the door with a sigh, debated whether to make tea as he entered the kitchen. But he should have known better than to think he could outlast the patience of his indomitable confederate. Audrey was sitting at the table, still dressed for the day, waiting for him. A half-drunk cup of tea sat in front of her and an empty one sat at his place.
Siegfried’s heart sank and he froze, mouth hanging open. In the suit which matched the color of his hair he gave the impression of a great red dog, waiting for a command.
“Mrs. Hall,” he said, helplessly.
Audrey took a deep breath and looked at him, her eyes rimmed with the faintest pink. He could see what an effort it was. She wore her armor so well that Siegfried usually forgot it was there. Brisk competence, dry wit. Tonight the absence of it bounded through him like a cataclysm. It reminded him of the weeks they’d waited for news of the Repulse.
She was scared.
“I want to hear it, Siegfried,” she said, folding her hands on the table in front of her. “I want to hear it all.”