William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

cover it from anyone else’s sight.
    “Being self-controlled is not the same thing as having no emotions,” she said with something approaching anger, as if she were speaking through him to Imogen.
    “No . . . no.” He was watching her closely. “Hester . . . don’t . . .”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know. I wish I could help, but . . .”
    She smiled at him. “I know. There is nothing. But thank you for coming.”
    He leaned forward and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then suddenly put his arms around her and hugged her properly, holding her closely for a moment before letting her go, coughing to clear his throat, and muttering good-bye before he turned to leave.
     
     
    Sitting alone at the breakfast table, Callandra also was deeply shaken by the picture of Elissa in the newspaper. Her first thought was not how it might affect the jury in the court, but her own amazement that Elissa should look so vulnerable. She had found it difficult enough when Hester had told her that she was beautiful, and then that her actions in Vienna had been passionate and brave. Callandra had created in her mind the picture of a hard and brittle loveliness, something dazzling, but a matter of perfect bones and skin, dramatic coloring, perhaps handsome eyes. She was not prepared for a face where the heart showed through, where the dreams were naked and the pain of disillusion clear for anyone to see. How could Kristian have stopped loving her?
    Why do people stop loving? Could it be anything but a weakness within themselves, an incapacity to give and go on giving, somewhere a selfishness? Her mind raced back over all she could remember of Kristian, every time they had met in the hospital, and before that the long hours they had spent during the typhoid outbreak in Limehouse. Every picture, every conversation, seemed to her tirelessly generous. She could see, as if it were before her now, his face in the flickering lights of the makeshift ward, exhausted, lined with anxiety, his eyes dark and shadowed around the sockets. But he had never lost his temper or his hope. He had tried to ease the distress of the dying, not only their physical pain but their fear and grief.
    Or was she recalling it as she wished it to have been? It was so easy to do. She thought she was clear-sighted, a realist, but then perhaps everyone thought he was.
    And even if Kristian were all she believed in, his work with the sick, that did not mean he was capable of the kind of love that binds individuals. Sometimes it is easier to love a cause than a person. The demands are different. With a blinding clarity like the clean cut of a razor, so sharp at first you barely feel it, she saw the inner vanity of experiencing the uncritical dependence of someone profoundly ill who needs your help, whose very survival depends upon you. You have the power to ease immediate, terrible physical pain.
    The needs of a wife are nothing like that. A close human bond demands a tolerance, an ability to adjust, to moderate one’s own actions and to accept criticism, even unreasonable behavior at times, to listen to all kinds of chatter and hear the real message behind the words. Above all, it needs the sharing of self, the dreams and the fears, the laughter and the pain. It means taking down the defenses, knowing that sooner or later you will be hurt. It means tempering ideals and acknowledging the vulnerable and flawed reality of human beings.
    Perhaps, after all, Kristian was not capable of that, or simply not willing. She thought back to earlier in the year, to the men from America who had come to buy guns for the Civil War which was even now tearing that country apart. They had been idealists, and one at least had permitted the general passion to exclude the particular. Hester had told her of it in one of their many long hours together, of the slow realization, and the grief. It was a consuming thing, and allowed room for nothing and no one else. It sprang not from the justice of the cause but from the nature of the man. Was Kristian like that, too, a man who could love an idea but not a woman? It was possible.
    And perhaps she herself had been guilty of falling in love with an ideal, not a real man, with his passions that were less bright, and his weaknesses?
    Then it would not matter what Elissa was like, how brave and beautiful, how generous or how kind, or funny, or anything else. It could have been she who was trapped in the marriage, and sought her way out through