‘I think so too,’ says Dain simply, and I breathe easier. If this is as curly as it gets, I should be OK.
‘Do you think Anne Brontë is asking us to have sympathy for Huntingdon?’
‘Not really. She portrays him as a man that no one should aspire to be like.’
‘Did you personally have sympathy for him?’
‘A little, he’s a weak-willed man who can’t resist vice, and he pays the price for it by dying young. Shades of Branwell indeed.’
‘Did you like Helen as a character?’
‘She was all right. The switch from innocent virgin to moralistic widow was handled well. But her situation is hard to relate to in this day and age. Women have more freedoms now and are less likely to get stuck in a loveless marriage.’Though the way I’m headed ...
‘Interesting.’ Dain uncaps his pen and makes a note on his pad, but his writing is all swirly, so I can’t see what he’s written.
‘Did you have sympathy for Huntingdon?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he says. ‘He deserved everything he got and more. He was a cheating alcoholic, and he abused her.’
I raise my eyebrows and play devil’s advocate. ‘Wow, speaking of moralistic, I thought you were a Huntingdon slash Branwell supporter?’
Dain’s nose wrinkles. ‘I never said I condoned Branwell’s drunken rants, only that I sympathised with him over having his heart broken and that he served as a catalyst for the male heroes in the sisters’ novels.’
‘You could apply that to Gilbert as well,’ I remark. ‘What about the bit where he attacks Lawrence with his whip?’ I flick to the section I’ve marked and read aloud, ‘“It was not without a feeling of savage satisfaction that I beheld the instant, deadly pallor that overspread his face, and the few red drops that trickled down his forehead.”There you go. He’s just as ruthless!’
‘Hmmm, true,’ says Dain, thoughtfully. ‘Women always seem to go for the bad boys, even back then ... Why do you think that is?’ He’s looking at me with a certain glint in his eye, which makes me uncomfortable.
I shift in my seat. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t major in psych. But I’d say it’s to do with not having a good male role model growing up.’
Dain’s lips twist with the hint of a grin, but his tone is serious. ‘Would you class me as a bad boy?’
I stare at him, taken aback. OK, this is getting a bit personal. I don’t particularly want to reveal what I think of him. ‘Er, I don’t know you that well. But based on what I’ve seen, no, I wouldn’t class you as a bad boy.’
‘Interesting.’ He smirks and jots down another little note, which annoys me. What the hell is he writing? And even more, what is he insinuating?
Our food arrives, hot from the grill, and squirting ketchup on my chips serves as a natural distraction from the way the conversation is headed. I feel exposed—like Dain’s picked up on something about my relationship with Klint being off, but he’s not coming outright and saying it. He’s met him once; he doesn’t get to make that call. What about his own mysterious break-up with Joelle? I’m sorely tempted to ask him some awkward questions about that. However, I manage to keep myself in check with difficulty.
We eat in silence, but the atmosphere between us has changed from amiable to suspicious, on my part anyway. It’s high time I asked him some pointed questions of my own.
Placing my knife and fork to the side of the plate, I check my notes. ‘So Anne was writingThe Tenant of Wildfell Hallin the spring of 1847, and Charlotte was writingJane Eyre—is that right?’
‘Yes.’ Dain picks up a chip with his long fingers and dips it in the puddle of ketchup on his plate.
‘What was Emily writing during that time? I wonder.’
Dain bites off the end of the chip, chews slowly, and swallows. ‘Poetry,’ he says eventually.
‘Are you sure about that? According to my research, there were no poems produced during that period, which is odd since she was so prolific in the previous years.’
He shrugs. ‘Charlotte most likely destroyed them.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. Why keep her earlier poems and destroy her later ones? I think the reason there weren’t any poems is that Emily was diverting her creativity into writing her second novel.’
‘Perhaps.’ He swirls another chip.
‘So you think it did exist?’
He shrugs. ‘We’ll never know.’ Dain’s left eye twitches, and call it female intuition, but I suspect he’s hiding something.
