No, no, no, no. If she started thinking, she’d immediately sink into the pit of angst that had consumed her yesterday – and if she did that, the pit of guilt I’d been sinking into would consume me too. ‘Let’s go down to breakfast. You’re clearly hungry, if you’re eating your lipstick.’
Her hand flew to cover her mouth. ‘Good idea.’
‘You know,’ I said, opening the door for her, ‘I don’t think you’ve ever said those words to me before.’
‘If you had more good ideas, then maybe I would.’
It was a half-hearted bit of repartee, but I let myself ascend a rung on the ladder out of the pit of guilt anyway.
It didn’t last, though. The minute we sat down at a table together, having made ourselves plates at the buffet, Sadie sank back into herself, and I slid straight back down.
I had thought a lot about marriage. You couldn’t study early modern theatre and not think about it. Whether it was the joyous fifth-act weddings and fêtes of comedies likeMuch Ado About NothingorA Chaste Maid in Cheapsideor the messy couple drama of tragedies likeMacbethorThe Duchess of Malfi,marriage was a constant preoccupation. Given I’d written my thesis and then mymonograph on the depiction of relationships on the Jacobean stage, I’d probably spent years of my life musing on marriage.
What I hadn’t really thought about was my own.
Love – now that means something to me,Sadie had said, that fateful night when she’d proposed to me.Marriage, not so much.
One of the reasons I’d said yes to this absurd scheme was that I felt – well, no, perhaps not exactly the same way. There were nuances. Similarly, though.
Marriage to my father had turned my mother into a shadow of herself. I, like the rest of my family, had been convinced that Fiona was throwing her future away by getting married – and shitty as I felt about it now, I ultimately hadn’t been wrong. By all logic, the ring on my finger should be nothing but a costume for me.
So why was it that all I’d been able to think about since the day I’d kissed my bride was making her happy?
‘Why are you staring at me, Jonah?’ Sadie asked abruptly, fork halfway to her mouth. ‘Do I have something on my face?’
‘Oh! I, um…’ I had a PhD in words – why was I so frequently lost for them? ‘Sorry. You’re just in my line of sight.’
She raised an eyebrow. It was obvious disapproval, but it was also pure, unadulterated Sadie Shaw: original flavour, not its recent miserable shadow.
It buoyed me enough to try the move again that had not worked in the security line yesterday. ‘There’s some rental places we could look at tomorrow evening, if you want,’ I said, taking out my phone and quickly starring a couple I knew she’d hate before I handed it to her. ‘I’m sure you’re not interested in using me as a pillow long-term.’
‘Oh, ha ha,’ she said dryly, starting to scroll. ‘You’re a real comedian.’
I leant back in my chair, grinning at her over my coffee. ‘I try.’
‘Not well.’
There was that acerbic note in her voice. There she was, there was the woman that had said “I can’t stand you” to teenage Jonah and ground his pride and his heart into a bloody pulp. ‘Please tell me this is a joke.’ She turned the phone around, displaying one of the places I’d just starred.
I put my foot on the next rung of the ladder out of the pit of guilt and hoisted myself up. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘What’s wrong with it?!’ A flush was creeping up her chest. ‘What’swrongwith it?’
That argument carried us all the way through breakfast, and all the way back upstairs so she could fix her lipstick. ‘What part of “green space” was ambiguous to you, Fisher?’ she demanded, sticking her head out of the bathroom, lip-liner in one hand. ‘How am I supposed to grow the vegetables for your gourmet cuisine in three square centimetres of concrete?’
‘One, at no point did I insist on you doing that. We’re living in Australia’s fucking larder now, you don’t need to farm the land and provide for us. Two, if anyone could get whatever the gardening term is for blood from a stone, surely it would be you, Shaw.’
She made a familiar noise of frustration, but her eyes were alight. She was enjoying herself.
One of the lesser-known genres of Jacobean drama was the domestic tragedy.34The most famous example was Thomas Heywood’s 1603playA Woman Killed With Kindness, which I’d written about extensively because it told the story of a marriage.
There were not a lot of lessons to take from it. If you boiled it down to the bare bones of the plot, it was about a man who was allegedly too kind to his wife because he sent her away instead of revenge-murdering her when he caught her cheating on him (leading to her longer, more agonising death by guilty starvation).
Perhaps, though, there was a lesson for me in the title.
In the airport, Chess had grabbed me by the collar and made what she expected of me very, very clear.
I’m not going to tell you not to lay a finger on her, she’d snarled.Sadie’s an adult. She can do what she wants. Fuck who she wants. Marry who she wants.
