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March 1946
Siegfried comes into the kitchen whistling. The Mikado, Audrey thinks; she is not much of a fan of musical plays, herself, but she’s absorbed enough by osmosis over the years.
It is barely seven o’clock. Tristan will sleep for another hour in anticipation of a day in surgery and James is at Heston Grange. He has finally convinced Helen to move back to Skeldale, and preparations are ongoing. They’ve all been feeling rather celebratory as a result.
“You’re chipper this morning,” she says, setting out toast next to the pudding. She is tidy as always, blue pinny tied tight, curls pinned.
The music from Siegfried’s lips stops short. He seems to pull in on himself a little; it’s odd, for him. Audrey’s brows furrow.
“Am I? I suppose. I am as susceptible to the allure of spring as the next man, Mrs. Hall.”
It is an unseasonably mild day for the beginning of March, but Audrey squints suspiciously at him. Something is on Siegfried’s mind. Well, it’s never long before it comes out. She can wait. They sit at the table and begin their breakfast in silence. Siegfried is wearing his sturdiest brown suit for a day in the fields. He absently peruses the newspaper.
“How were the film?”
“What film?” he replies, not looking up.
“You saw Gilda last night, didn't you? With Dorothy.”
These past two months have been difficult ones for Audrey. Siegfried and Dorothy have been courting openly and see each other a few times a week. Audrey should be delighted, being the one who urged them together in the first place, but things are a bit more complicated than that.
“Ah,” he says, shifting in his chair. “Actually, we didn’t get around to it.”
Audrey takes a blithe bite of toast. “I’ve heard it’s very exciting.”
“Hm.” Siegfried has exited the conversation. Audrey shrugs. She’s breakfasted a thousand times with less stimulation than this (mostly with him).
Several quiet minutes later they are both finishing their respective meals, and Siegfried slaps his newspaper down on the table.
“Well, if you must know,” he blurts out, as if Audrey were hounding him for information which she most assuredly is not, “Dorothy and I had a… discussion last night.”
Audrey’s stomach drops. “A discussion.”
Siegfried removes his spectacles and sets them on the table, avoiding direct eye contact. That in itself is not unusual. The man sometimes seems to inhabit a reality entirely of his own making.
“I know I’m not the most patient of men,” he begins, “but I can enjoy the early stages of a relationship as well as anyone. There’s a sense of discovery, of getting to know and like each other. Neither party gives much thought to what comes next, and that is as it should be. The future shouldn’t weigh heavily on every moment. But sooner or later things must change—which after all is the natural state of things, at least according to Heraclitus. I believe the Ancient Greek can be translated into something like ‘in change, we rest,’ but even that is often misquoted.” He pauses for breath and shakes his head. For once, he realizes he is prattling. “But that is neither here nor there.”
Audrey holds her breath, unconsciously fiddling with her fork. Normally she would give Siegfried a dry look and congratulate him for not falling down a didactic rabbit hole as he so often does, but today she can only think of what comes next. Siegfried is about to inform her that he has asked Dorothy to marry him. That’s why they didn’t see Gilda: they forgot about it in the happy haze of the newly engaged. It’s not been long enough, she thinks in a panic. Only two months. I thought I had more time to get used to the idea.
I thought I had more time.
In her forty-eight years Audrey has seen two wars, a husband turning to angry, violent dust before her eyes and a son slipping away, at the time she believed never to return. Not an easy life, by any means, although those things are firmly behind her now. But she must be getting soft with age because falling in love with Siegfried Farnon too late rivals the worst of it.
Not falling, no—this is not new. Realizing, perhaps. Accepting.
For a decade he has been the man at the center of her existence. The one she looks forward to being with at the end of the day, the one she left Gerald for, the one she missed every minute of her time in Sunderland. Siegfried is the blaring, bright, infuriating light of her life. He is home. She loves every little quirk, every outsized emotion, even the tempests he rages over the littlest things. He’s not cruel or dangerous, as Robert was. He just feels deeply and can’t see very far outside of himself, sometimes. But when he does, the force of his caring takes her breath away.
She could never admit these feelings to herself, of course. Audrey told herself a doozy of a story for years: she was simply addicted to being needed, you see. Not a healthy trait but who could change their stripes? Her mother had been the same way. It was as Siegfried once put it: Audrey Hall was the patron saint of lost causes. That was exactly it.
She also told Siegfried’s tale. He was an addict too. Helpless and irrational by birth and lonely by circumstance, he developed an unnatural attachment to his housekeeper. Sometimes she worried he was teetering on the edge of falling in love with her, but that was just another indulgence from which she needed to protect him.
It all made perfect sense if you didn’t look too closely. Shepherd and sheep. Monster and keeper. Mother and child, sometimes. Not two strong, compassionate adults of sound mind who chose each other again and again. Never that.
Siegfried’s eyes are fixed on the table as he continues.
“I’ve been guided by your own advice, Mrs. Hall, as in many things. You once told me—and obviously I’m paraphrasing—to get my head out of the clouds and see what was right under my nose. Typically unsparing words,” he says, finally looking at her directly with a tight smile, “but they struck a chord. I let them lead me down a path I never thought I would tread.”
Audrey remembers the conversation well. It was the closest Siegfried had ever come to telling her he loved her; but like every other time he tried, she gave him either the stunned silence of denial or an indulgent pat on the arm, never to speak of it again. Finally, in some kind of desperate, last ditch effort, he implied she was his other half and she just smiled and told him to call someone better. Someone glamorous, beautiful, worldly. Undamaged.
What a deluded, daft idiot she was. That conversation will haunt her to the end of her days.
She keeps her expression neutral. It isn’t easy.
“Now it seems that I’ve come to a fork in that path,” Siegfried continued, “and there was a decision to make. I have to admit it happened sooner than I expected it to; I suppose one could accuse me of acting hastily. I worried you might think me hasty, in fact. But one can't force a timeline on matters of the heart.”
His tone is intimate, casual. They are no stranger to heart to heart conversations. She knows him, though, as well as she knows herself, and today she gets the sense he is being very careful: likely assessing her for a negative reaction. Audrey knows she is integral to the physical and spiritual health of the household, and that if her equilibrium were upset everyone could suffer. The thought that her feelings are important to him but not for the reason she wants them to be drives her out of her chair, collecting dishes and heading to the sink, a tightness in her chest. She feels unbearably exposed.
But she will be fine. She will push her feelings down deep and get on with things, as she always has. She will continue to care for Siegfried and the rest of the Skeldale family, and even Dorothy if she has to. Eventually her love will fade into the warm, cordial relationship she and Siegfried had when they first met. In the meantime Audrey should make an effort to put herself first once in a while, and think about what she really wants—beyond Siegfried, Skeldale, and even her son. She will not be an afterthought in her own life anymore. She absently rubs two fingers over the ache in her chest and begins the washing up.
“And,” Siegfried goes on, “when I found myself worrying more about what you would think than what she would think, I knew my decision had already been made.”
Audrey freezes, a bowl in her hand, and blinks. What?
“An advantage to breaking things off after a relatively short period is that no one wasted too much time on the wrong person. I think Dorothy appreciated that, in a way.”
She almost turns around and laughs, says Confusing man, it sounded like you just said— But his words were perfectly clear. He has not asked Dorothy to marry him. He has shown her the door.
“It’s not that I think your advice was unwise, Mrs. Hall.” Siegfried actually sounds apologetic. “It’s that I found myself quite unable to follow it in the end. My head floats on, it seems. You must think me a hopeless romantic.”
The dishes in the sink are getting blurry and it’s a bit difficult to breathe.
“I know you are that,” she says with great effort, trying to imbue her voice with humor.
Nothing is as Audrey thought it was. The reality she came to know over the past months, the regret and the longing and the two happy people on the other side of a glass wall upon which she could only pound unheard and unseen, vanishes before her eyes and leaves her absolutely reeling. In an attempt to steady herself she clutches the edge of the counter and ends up dropping the bowl she was holding into the sink. It doesn’t break but it clatters loudly and she grabs it with her other hand to stop the sound.
“Mrs. Hall?”
Audrey barely hears him over the rushing in her ears. The tightness in her chest hasn’t dissipated but only builds, months and years of repressed emotion and it is more than she can bear. Her breath heaves and she tries to stop, refuses to lose control in so obvious a way.
“Mrs. Hall.” She startles because Siegfried has come up behind her and she didn’t hear him. He puts a hand on her arm. His voice is impossibly gentle. “Audrey.”
She can’t bear to face him so she scrubs a plate with a dishrag—the busy and necessary nature of her work has always been a convenient refuge—and turns her head halfway.
“What?”
“You’re crying.”
“I am not,” she denies with as much indignance as she can muster. But when she turns back to the sink and a tear joins the dishwater, she succumbs. “Oh, blast it,” she says, and he turns her and takes her in his arms.
Audrey Hall does not weep often. It is not in her nature. She shed tears for Edward, of course, first missing him and then worrying for him and finally celebrating his narrow miss. But there is always a little voice inside her when she comes close to breaking that whispers What d’you have to feel so sorry about? She hates that voice, instinctively knows that she needs the occasional respite from strength as much as anyone, but it takes no such respite from her. Now, however, encircled in the unknowing arms of the man she loves, her mind goes blessedly quiet. She shakes into his chest, clutching at and wetting his shirt. It will need attention after this.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hall,” he says softly. “She’s your friend, and I never should have…” He trails off, at an obvious loss, and produces a handkerchief for her from a pocket. “It would have been dishonest to continue. If it’s any consolation, she did not seem particularly surprised.”
He thinks Audrey is upset at his callousness towards her friend. She can’t bear for him to think that.
“Oh,” she hitches. “Dorothy will be all right.”
She does not know that for sure. Dorothy is her close friend but she has always been hard to read, especially when it comes to men. They haven’t talked about Siegfried much since Christmas, and Audrey never got the sense that Dorothy was cock-a-hoop, but that doesn’t mean Dorothy isn’t hurting over the rejection.
Audrey feels Siegfried take a breath as he prepares to ask what is upsetting her, and then a release as he decides not to. He sways a little, rocking her probably without realizing it. She thinks of how gentle he is despite all his bluster, how good he is with his animals and his godbabies and what a wonderful father he would have made and it makes her cry harder because he has never been able to keep what he wants, whether it was his wife or the chance to have children or even Audrey in the face of her son’s injury. She still feels guilty for leaving him for Sunderland, even though there was nothing else she could have done.
“I thought I was supposed to be the broken-hearted one,” he says with wry, helpless humor.
He doesn’t sound broken-hearted. He sounds relieved, and more himself than he has in weeks. But he does not understand why Audrey is crying. She barely does; it is as if she has been given a pardon, seconds from the noose, that she does not deserve. A reprieve. And she has no idea what to do with it. So she just lets him hold her, and for once she does not think ahead to what anyone needs outside of this moment.
Eventually she quiets, a sniffle or two absorbed by the cluttered yet pristine kitchen around them. He does not let her go.
“Mrs. Hall,” he begins. She presses her lips against the urge to ask him to call her Audrey again. She has never really considered whether she likes her name—what a self-indulgent train of thought that would be—but it is beautiful, coming from him. “I think of us as the captains of this ship. No one else knows the destination or how to get there.”
It is an odd metaphor but Audrey understands completely. They do indeed helm the household. They also understand in a way the others cannot the delicate task of holding a family together, knowledge borne of great loss, and are determined to keep this one on course. The destination itself is difficult to describe but Audrey supposes it is nothing other than what they have now: happy children bounding down stairs; thriving, connected adults; and nightcaps before the fire. She suspects Siegfried would agree.
“This puts us in a rather solitary position, you see,” he continues. “As such, there is no one to take care of me but you, and no one to take care of you but me.”
It is the kind of elegant statement Siegfried occasionally lobs at her with invisible but devastating results. She feels it like a blow to the gut, and wipes her face to hide its effect as he pulls his head back to look down at her.
“Obviously,” he says, smiling, “you get the shorter end of the stick in this scenario. But I will try my best.” She laughs; it comes out more like a sob. “All this is to say, if there’s ever anything bothering you, you can come to me. God knows I pester you at the slightest inconvenience. I think you’re owed some attention.”
Audrey has regained enough composure to look up at him. They are comfortable with one another, physically, but he is so close and his eyes are so warm and it is almost more than she can take. The moment of consolation has passed and it occurs to her how they must look: standing together with Siegfried’s arms around her, his smile fading in favor of something she can not identify. She flattens one of her hands against his chest, feeling the thrum of his heart through his waistcoat.
“You’re like the princess with a pea under her mattress.”
Siegfried looks torn between relief at the return of her humor and slight offense.
“Yes, well, no need to eviscerate me immediately.”
She laughs again and steps back. His hands linger on her arms as she goes, as if he is unsure he has done enough. “Call it therapy,” she teases, her voice raspy but strong. She wipes at her eyes one last time. “And you’d miss it if I didn’t.”
“Do you know, I believe I would.” They both hold on to his handkerchief a moment too long as she returns it. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.”
Audrey is all right. She feels lighter. A good cry has always been cathartic; it clears clutter from the mind. Now, as she looks at Siegfried, her handsome old dog of a co-captain, standing just far away enough from her as is proper with his arms hanging loosely by his sides in case she might need them again, her heart flutters.
“The search for your other half continues, then?” she ventures.
He has begun to study his shoes. His head snaps up. “What? Oh, yes. Plato.”
“Aristophanes.”
“Quite right.” His smile is a little sad. “I’m beginning to think you may have been correct, Mrs. Hall. That my romantic dream is an unrealistic one. Still,” he says, in a weak attempt at cheer, “perhaps it’s better to be alone than with a half that doesn’t match.”
Audrey should leave Siegfried be. He is obviously feeling a bit raw. She needs to settle, to think about things. She should find some comforting words and send him off to the fields as she always does. The routine will do them both good.
She should call on Dorothy.
The sadness in Siegfried’s voice, however, roots Audrey to the spot. She is unable to pretend everything is the same as it has always been. Her own inner voice screams, Me! Me! That other half is me! She is ravenous to say it, for him to know that she finally understands. She can’t bear him not knowing. Hope has inched its way into her heart and yes, it is terrifying, but what could be worse than watching him slip away? If she missed her chance so be it but she needs to know, and now.
What I want won't be an afterthought anymore.
“Maybe it were just a matter of… timing,” she says quietly.
Siegfried tilts his head at her in question, and she looks down at the hands she is nervously wiping on her pinny.
“Suppose you did find your other half, but she weren’t quite ready for you.”
“How,” he says, and she almost misses the slight falter in his voice, “do you mean?”
“It weren’t as simple as fitting two puzzle pieces together,” she replies, a little defensive. She is not sure why she feels the need to explain. “These things take time. And there are considerations. Not everyone were brave as you.”
The ensuing silence is deafening. Having perused every line and crease of her overworked fingers, Audrey dares a look at Siegfried. He is focused, unseeing, over her shoulder. She can practically hear his mind working; years of conclusions fall like dominoes in his expression. He meets her eyes, brows furrowed, and she sees him realize why she was crying. He swallows heavily.
“I’m not brave. Far from it.”
“Yes, you’re brave,” she insists. “Even after all you’ve been through you wear your heart on your sleeve and I know that weren’t easy. Some of us barely know what were inside our own hearts.”
Siegfried’s face softens. Her words have moved him, and he looks at her as he has only a few times before—has let himself look, perhaps—like his world would cease if she were not standing there. He sways towards her slightly, then pulls back and puts his hands in his pockets. He seems to choose his next words very carefully.
“If I found myself in such a situation, with a person who might not be ready, would you advise me to wait for her?”
Audrey’s heart pounds but she forces herself to hold his hopeful gaze, to ignore all the voices inside her, the what will people say and the I don’t deserve—
“No.”
The way Siegfried’s face falls pulls painfully at her gut. “Oh.”
“I mean, yes,” she stammers, “but—not for long. Not long at all—”
She launches herself across the space between them with more force than she intends because it isn’t planned; all she wants is finally to reach him, to take that lovely face between her hands and kiss him, and she does so in spirited fashion.
He must be surprised but there is no way for her to tell because he kisses her back as naturally as breathing, although it takes him a second to get his hands out of his pockets and wrap them around her. He is strong and soft, his beard gently scratches her face, he tastes like coffee and holds her so tightly it is nearly uncomfortable, and it is far better than she ever imagined it would be. His hand slides up to cradle the back of her neck and it sends a thrill through her; instinctively she pulls back because she is already in danger of getting carried away, and she is not the type of woman to get carried away kissing a man, especially for the first time. Instead she presses her forehead to his and attempts to steady herself. She is breathless with triumph. She has done it; she has scaled the wall and reached him on the other side, all these years later. It feels… well, it feels glorious. Siegfried’s smile is so radiant it bleeds into even the smallest of the creases around his beautiful eyes.
“Quite right,” he says again, with bemused understatement. “Who’s the brave one now?”
“I have me moments.”
She lets her hands fall to his chest and he shelters her again, bringing one hand to her cheek to address a bit of moisture under her eye with a tender swipe of his thumb. Has it really only been a moment since she was crying? Good Lord, her eyes are probably still puffy from it. Her head spins at the speed at which things are happening. It looks as though Siegfried’s head may be spinning, too.
“Audrey, you have me at an uncharacteristic loss for—“
“I love you, Siegfried Farnon.”
Her upturned face glows. She can’t quite believe she has said it. The urge to clamp her hand over her own mouth rises and she pushes it down. It’s terrifying, like jumping off a precipice, but she won’t let reticence hold her back this time. Not when she is so much more than just hopeful, or optimistic.
Siegfried looks so gobsmacked Audrey worries he might fall over. She wouldn’t blame him. He tightens his arms around her as if she will slip through them and searches her face, possibly looking for a catch that doesn’t exist.
“Keeping it simple, are we?” he says with an almost cutting sarcasm. He has always used humor to dispel nerves or great emotion, and she almost laughs with the pure joy of having pushed Siegfried as off-kilter as he makes her on a regular basis. Now he knows what it feels like.
It doesn’t take him long to recover, however. Audrey has unwittingly granted him permission to throw restraint out the window.
“All right, how’s this for simple?” he says, and it sounds like a challenge. “Marry me.”
He is in earnest. Of course he is. Audrey lets her head fall forward to his lapel and nearly sighs Mr. Farnon but that is hardly appropriate now. With indulgent relish she moans, “Siegfried—”
“What?” he cries. “You love me, I love you, isn’t that what we’re talking about here?”
Audrey’s nose is buried in his jacket and she inhales deeply. His scent is familiar to her, of course. As is the way he impulsively cuts to the heart of whatever matter he deems important in the moment. She’s never been this close to the eye of his storm—never felt as safe from it.
“Can we please take this one step at a time?”
“You have obliterated several steps this morning, my dear,” he accuses, but not unkindly.
He is not wrong. Part of Audrey is astonished that she has opened her own floodgates so fully and decisively. She has no regrets; but she does have her limits, at least for now. She looks up at Siegfried again and uses a tone she knows he will recognize, the deceptively mild one that brooks no argument.
“And I think that were enough for one day.”
The corner of Siegfried’s mouth twitches. He knows when he is being reined in. He asks, much gentler now, “Are you worried about what people will think?”
Audrey sighs, realizing that this is the very question she has been avoiding in her own mind. Now that it’s been asked, dread doesn’t creep over her like she expected it would.
“Not exactly. But… how is this going to work?” A man and his housekeeper falling in love is not a new story, nor does it often end well.
“I don’t know,” he says with characteristic frankness. “However we want it to. The world has changed, you know.”
She has never heard him cast a changing world in a positive light before.
“You hate change.”
“Not this one.”
“Fair enough. Just don’t expect it to be easy.”
“Nothing with you ever is.”
Her mouth gapes playfully and she gives him a little shove. He beams with pleasure.
“I should have told you long ago how hopelessly in love with you I am,” he says.
He has such a beautiful voice, rich and mellifluous. Everything he speaks sounds like poetry, like he was raised on it. Maybe he was. In any case, all the Audrey and my dear and love are turning her head even further.
“You did,” she smiles. “In a thousand ways. I just weren’t listening. I were… running, from my feelings. I’m not proud that it took almost losing you to see that.”
Siegfried scoffs. “You wouldn’t have lost me. I would have grown old puttering around this house, pining for you.”
It’s a lovely, if sad, sentiment and Audrey can see he believes it, but she knows it isn’t true. Sooner or later he would have given up. She is thankful she had the courage to say something before that happened.
“Daft beggar,” she beams. “It were just like you to be flapping about nowt when you could be kissing me instead.”
He does kiss her then, but his kiss isn’t impulsive and desperate as hers was. She thinks it might be the gentlest thing anyone has ever done. His lips move against hers and his arms wrap around her in a way that makes her feel utterly cherished. This is not a kiss of shallow or recent feeling. This is the kiss of someone who has been deeply in love for a very long time. Tears spring to her closed eyes and she gives it all back to him, an endless loop of tenderness.
Siegfried pulls back only far enough to murmur, “I couldn’t give up what we have. Even without this. The way we are, it would have had to change if I were with anyone else. And I couldn’t bear that.”
Clasped hands and comfort and intimate conversations, evenings by the fire. It sustains him, too.
“Just know,” he says, “that whatever you want of me is yours. I’d marry you, I’d live with you in sin—don’t laugh, I would—I’d be your slave. You could keep me in the pantry and let me out when the fancy strikes. There are still enough sardines in there to last me some time.”
It is absurd, and quite possibly the most romantic thing Audrey has ever heard in her life.
Before she can call him daft again the outside world begins to intrude on Audrey’s consciousness. She could stand with him like this all day, murmuring truths they no longer have to hide, but the sounds of the house and the call of her daily tasks pull her back to earth. There is also the small matter of Tristan rising soon. Audrey doesn’t think even Siegfried is ready for that.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
“Oh, that’s right,” he says, shaking his head as if emerging from a particularly pleasant dream. “I’m a vet.”
She laughs. “Life doesn’t stop for us going all spoony.”
“It bloody well should,” he says firmly. “I think we deserve to go a little spoony.”
“We do. But the animals don’t care nowt about that. You’ve got a list to get on with.”
He pats his pockets in search of said list—not an easy task, as neither he nor Audrey are inclined to separate—and she points to the table.
“That’s awfully far away,” he says, doubtful.
“You’ll survive.”
He slants his eyes at her as if debating whether to argue the point, then wisely decides to keep the thought to himself. Energy begins to emanate from him, powerful and restless, the way it does before he is propelled into movement. Audrey has become adept at predicting him but even she is wrong half the time. Still, she enjoys watching him brew. With a squeeze of her waist he strides to the table and plucks a scrap of paper from beside his plate.
“My list is in hand.”
“A good place for it.”
Audrey turns back to the counter and fairly sags against the smooth wooden surface. This has been a roller coaster of a morning. Still, the clock keeps on and she has her own things to do. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear to the sound of Siegfried muttering about his car keys; her fingers are still shaking with exhilaration. Distantly, she knows there are more questions she will have to face, and soon. In the meantime she looks forward to immersing herself in the rhythm of the day, settling her feelings under the weight of responsibility.
As he passes her on his way out, Siegfried does something he has never done before: he catches her hand. Just for a moment, not lingering or pulling or asking anything of her. Just a touch of his careworn fingers against hers. A confirmation that whatever this is, they are in it together.
It is, somehow, more intimate than a kiss. Audrey feels her face burning a violent shade of pink.
“Oh, go on,” she sputters, but they are both smiling as he slips out the door.