mommy was a sick muse (part iv)
[part iii]
~
iv. | we looked at them eleven ways
With Crawford’s words rattling around her skull like the bells from Notre Dame, Mary barely survives to Wednesday. If not for Mary and Lydia’s charming blend of verbal abuse and sisterly affection, she probably wouldn’t have even been ready for dinner with Richard. As it is, she weathers Lydia’s bitching about her useless charcoal-based organic eyeliner without any comments beyond zombie-like single-syllable responses.
“You’re like a doll,” says Lydia disapprovingly as she and Kitty push Mary down the stairs to the kitchen. “Look at you. Flopping around.”
Kitty, bless her, catches Mary’s elbow before she walks into the doorframe to the kitchen. “What is wrong with you? Lydia’s been at you all afternoon and you haven’t said a thing.”
“I’m fine,” says Mary robotically. She’s having a hard time seeing properly-thus the doorframe-and she comes into herself long enough to blink forcefully. “Is our kitchen normally so lopsided? Shit, Lydia, I think you gave me the wrong contacts.”
At the stove, a fuzzy Lizzie asks, “I thought you didn’t own contacts? Aren’t they bad for the environment, along with microwaves and all other modern conveniences?”
“Right,” agrees Mary, shaking her head, trying to work out the cobwebs left by Crawford’s rant. “Of course I don’t. Why the fuck am I wearing them, then?”
“Your prescription is basically Mum’s,” says Lydia dismissively.
“I can’t see, which indicates that it is not,” hisses Mary.
Lydia flops onto one of the counter stools and pulls out her phone. “Trust me, you look great.”
“Bit difficult to judge, as I am currently blind,” Mary points out. She can at least confirm that she is wearing her sexiest trousers, tight and navy with grey pinstripes, but beyond that she can’t speak as to the rest of the presentation; she was too disengaged in the process.
To her right, Kitty pats her elbow. “I’m not Lydia’s brand of slutty, and I promise that you’re gorgeous. Richard’s not going to know what hit him, up until he decides to skip dinner and just shag you in the back of his car.”
“Car sex is awkward,” Mary, Lizzie, and Lydia reply in muddled unison. Will clears his throat aggressively and hands Lizzie a bowl of chopped onions.
“Damn,” mutters Kitty. “I hate always being the last to know.”
“The last will undoubtedly be Jane,” Lydia tells her, head bent over the screen of her phone. “Vanilla darling that she is.”
“I’m sure Jane and Charlie are having plenty of lovely adventures,” says Lizzie loyally.
“Gah, it’s like trying to imagine Charles and Camilla,” mutters Kitty. “All proper and wot. You wouldn’t think imagining two attractive people having sex would be off-putting, but it really is.”
“Well, thank God this family has some sense of propriety,” Lizzie declares. “I was worried for our eternal souls.”
All of her sisters present in the kitchen take a moment to convey via their faces how they feel about that spot of nonsense. If there were a book open in Ladbrokes about the status of the cumulative Bennet family’s chances of getting into heaven, even Jane’s pristine soul isn’t enough to save the rest of them. “Right,” drawls Lydia after a protracted pause.
Mary forces herself to stop fussing with the hair that she can’t see and grimly folds her hands in front of her. She rolls through a few of the yoga breathing exercises she can still remember, which is not a lot of them, and then she settles in an awkward bird-like pose on one of the kitchen stools. “Why did I let you dress me?” she asks Lydia blankly. “The last thing I really needed for this entire farce was to be blind and poured into uncomfortable clothing.”
“You love those pants, so stop bitching,” Lydia says lazily, snapping her gum. “Ungrateful brat.”
“Yes, because you’re definitely one to talk,” Mary snips back. Things are showing definite signs of descending into outright anarchy before Lizzie tips part of the tomatoes into the open flame of the stove and suddenly everyone becomes occupied in keeping the house from burning down around their ears.
After what feels like half a minute, Mary hears the wheels of Richard’s car on the gravel outside of the garden and, terrified and trembling, she’s pushing her hair out of her face and hurriedly having Kitty examine her for any sign of the soot that had poured out of the poor, decimated tomatoes. “You look fine,” Kitty assures her. “Here, a bit more of the lippy-”
Then Mary’s being thrust on unstable heels in the general direction of the door to the garden, lipstick shoved back into her purse and her purse slung over her shoulder. “Good luck!” Lydia and Kitty chorus, followed by Lizzie’s more sedate, “Have a nice evening,” and Will’s silent nod.
Mary catches her heel in the doorframe and almost face-plants into the withered remains of one of her mother’s potted petunias, but she’s upright and moderately presentable when Richard climbs out of his car and comes to take her hand. “Heya,” he says softly. He can probably see all of her sisters with their ugly faces mashed up to the kitchen windows; he kisses her lightly on the cheek and helps her to the passenger seat of his car.
Everything is distinctly classy and grown-up, which is a bit of a switch from Mary’s previous romantic interludes. After all, it’s not like Mary and Crawford have ever had a reason to go out for dinner in a context other than curry and lager after a particularly brutal exam, and the last person Mary had dated before Crawford had been on campus in Cambridge, where no one has a car or money to be spending on dates.
“This is nice,” says Mary inanely. “I like your, um, car.” Mary hates cars in general and on principle, but it seems like a pleasant thought to share.
Richard grins at her and guns into reverse. JESUS CHRIST, Mary’s brain screams, and she clutches at her safety belt with white-knuckled fingers. “It’s not mine,” Richard tells her casually, as though he often drives as if he was hired as an extra in one of the Jason Bourne films. “It’s my cousin Anne’s, but she’s out of the country for a few months and left it in my care. It’s one of those cars that have to be driven occasionally or else the engine will cry.”
“Ah,” says Mary shakily. Now that she’s looking for it, she can pick out design features that seem to indicate that this car was made to be driven excessively fast. She’s almost too scared to look at how high the speedometer goes. “I didn’t realize that cars were like that.”
“Good cars are like good pearls,” Richard says. “Or so my father tells my mother when she complains about his automotive purchases.”
It would not surprise Mary in this moment to learn that Richard is related to Crawford; that little bit of nonsense practically has generations-old nobility scrawled over it. “I didn’t know that,” she admits. “I don’t know anyone that owns a string of good pearls. Or a good car, now that I think about it.” She pauses and reflects. “Actually, it would not surprise me to learn that Will’s given Lizzie some expensive bit of pearly frippery.”
“Very astute of you,” Richard observes. “He’s giving her our grandmother’s sapphires for Christmas, in fact. You didn’t hear that, of course.”
Fascinated in spite of herself, Mary asks, “Oh god, do they have a name? Like, the Darcy sapphires?”
Richard laughs and changes gears. Mary’s stomach abruptly falls out onto the road; she can’t tell if it’s the effect of his smile, which is dazzlingly brilliant, or the car attempting to break a dozen traffic laws. “Not quite that distinguished, I’m afraid. They belonged to our grandmother before she married our grandfather. She left them to her eldest daughter, Will’s mum, and now they’re going to Will’s future wife.”
It’s odd to contemplate Lizzie as someone’s wife. She has always been just Lizzie, the most argumentative of the Bennet sisters and Da’s obvious favorite. Now that Lizzie works for a fabulous solicitor’s office in Glasgow and gets to argue with people for a living-and Will for fun-she’s not only going to be a wife, she’s going to be doing it in Scotland.
“They’re going to look fabulous on Lizzie.” What Mary doesn’t know about expensive jewels could fill a thousand years’ worth of encyclopedias, but she knows the theory behind what blue gems do to beautiful girls with blue eyes, and no one’s ever accused Lizzie of being unattractive. Will aside, of course, but he was clearly undergoing a brief surge of brain fever due to overexposure to Caro Bingley’s personality.
Richard’s face softens slightly. “She’s brilliant for Will.”
No, Mary thinks, some of the blood draining out of her head. No. Absolutely not. Because everything else in her life has turned out to be an absurd farce, she forces herself to look at Richard from a slightly more abstract plane, like a stranger. He’s not pining for Lizzie, is he? Mary’s the most like her, admittedly, but never were there a set of five siblings quite so different as the Bennet sisters, so most like is a nebulous concept.
He doesn't look like he’s pining. It’s a tough call to make, especially now that Mary knows that Crawford has apparently been acting the lovesick fool since the beginning of Michaelmas term right under her nose. “They’re good for each other,” she says, testing the ground before her stomach has a chance to rise angrily out of her throat. “They soften each other’s unfriendly aspects.”
There is nothing in Richard’s bearing that indicates that he wants to be the one softening Lizzie’s edges. “I’m just glad Will’s not moping any more. After your sister turned him down and he found out about Jane and Charlie, he spent two months in London sort of listlessly floating in and out of rooms like a Regency heroine.”
It’s hard to imagine Will doing anything listlessly, not with all of his fierce pride and a fairly hefty set of daddy issues that Mary can see like a blinking light hovering over his head, but Mary makes an agreeable noise in the back of her throat. “He’s definitely not anymore,” she points out. “The only bit of Will that’s like a Regency heroine now is the lovesickness.”
“And the profligate spending,” Richard adds.
Mary’s in her comfort zone; thanks to Jane and Kitty, she’s read her fair share of purloined bodice rippers. “I thought Regency heroines were usually poor as church mice?”
Richard holds up a hand as if to fend her off, which is one less hand controlling his snarling beast of a car. Mary bites down on her instinctual shout to watch the goddamn road. “I see I’m in the presence of an expert.”
“Hard not to be, with four sisters,” she explains. “I’m partial to science fiction and fantasy, myself, but Lizzie loves anything written between 1750 and 1950, and Mum’s pile of ’80s Mills & Boon novels might be bigger than Da’s collection of Socratic philosophers.”
“The Socratic philosophers have the disadvantage of incomplete preservation.”
The rest of the evening is like a recipe for Mary’s perfect date. Richard parks his demon car in a car park across the street from what turns out to be an incredibly posh vegetarian restaurant, and they split two entrees and spend hours lingering over their glasses of wine, talking about Mary’s classes and Richard’s clinic work. He’s incredibly well read about current events, and Mary has to tamp down her desire to leap onto the table and shout, “I have actually found a perfect human being.”
As he-slowly-drives her home, the conversation begins to die a gentle, comfortable death, and buoyed by three glasses of red wine, Mary isn’t inclined to push things. “Are you going to stay at the clinic?” she asks him, resting her head against the seat and closing her eyes. She can feel the soft glow of the streetlights as they roll across her eyelids.
“No, it was never intended to be a long-term arrangement.” When Richard changes gears now, Mary is almost attenuated to the sensation. Her stomach is filled with the best tortellini she’s ever eaten, and she just wants to bask. “I’ve actually enlisted.”
“For what?” asks Mary. She wonders suddenly if he’s interested in doing medical work abroad. The thought makes her feel with fluttery, bright feelings. At least twelve unsuitable fantasies come to mind. In the back of her head, she can hear Crawford’s dry, you’re only in love with the idea of you and Fitzhubert saving Malawi orphans, and fuck him. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to save Malawi orphans. The education as to the spread of AIDS through breast milk in that area is abysmal.
“RAMC,” he says.
It takes Mary a few seconds to work through, as acronyms in the medical profession are heavy on the ground. She thinks for a second that she hasn’t heard of that organization, and then: RAMC. Royal Army Medical Corps.
“I’m sorry, what?” She sits up so quickly that she almost brains herself on the ceiling of the car. “You’ve-enlisted? In the Royal Army Medical Corps?”
Richard’s face tightens. “I. Yes. I know that I should have mentioned this before, especially because of-everything. But I wanted us to have a nice evening.”
Oh my god. Oh my god. Mary gapes, like an idiot, until she realizes how rude she’s being and she snaps her jaw shut so quickly that it clicks. “When do you leave?” she asks breathily. What she really wants to ask is how the hell he’s justifying, as a medical professional, going to war, but Mary knows that her feelings about pacifism are naïve, even if she can’t shake them.
“February.”
The temperature in the car drops by a few degrees. “You’re leaving in two months?” Mary won’t even be done with Lent term by the time he leaves.
All of the distance between them is suddenly, starkly emphasized. Mary stares at the padded interior of his cousin’s hugely expensive panther of a car, at his hands on the wheel. She had spent months fantasizing about those hands, how gently they’d cradled newborns and guided her and Catherine in simple procedures, the way that his competency had been reflected in them.
She looks at his hands on the steering wheel, and it’s like a thousand miles are already between them.
~
The next morning, as Mary sips at a mug of coffee and has a marathon of Cracker on for the background noise, her father disengages from the crowd of furiously whispering family members in the kitchen and comes to the living room. “Out of all of my daughters,” muses her father in the doorframe, “you were the last one I expected to find stringing along two gentlemen at the same time.
“Da!” Mary exclaims, shocked out of her fugue state, but he doggedly persists.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” he asks, nailing her with a quelling look. “Mary, I thought you were too ethical for this.” He sits in his favorite chair catty-corner to the couch and uses the remote to turn down the volume on the telly.
“I’m not stringing anyone along!” Mary protests. She flushes at the memory of Crawford’s insistence that she make up her mind. “I have told everyone many times that Crawford and I aren’t dating. He wouldn’t’ve shagged Maria Bertram if we-” Belatedly, Mary remembers that she is talking to her father. “Er, that is.”
“Ah,” says her father. He leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers. If Mary had been asked three hours ago if her father was capable of looking crafty, she would’ve laughed hysterically; but now he’s got a look about him, one of Will on the verge of making a devastating acquisition for his financial empire. “I see. So you’re upset because he wasn’t faithful.”
Desperate, Mary clarifies, “Fidelity wasn’t part of our arrangement, Da. It was just-it was very casual.” God, she is explaining her casual sex agreement to her father. “My doubts about Crawford are based entirely on the fact that he is an awful person.”
“In what way?” he prods. “Is he cruel?”
“No,” admits Mary. “But-but he’s greedy and prideful and he hasn’t got a set of morals to guide a housefly, let alone a human being. He likes sexist literature and he barely knows Nelson Mandela from Idi Amin and when I told him about wanting to work for Médecins Sans Frontières, he laughed.” Her voice has begun to rise, both in volume and in pitch, until she finds herself shrieking.
“Not a very pleasant man,” her father says agreeably. “I don’t know why you’re friends with him at this rate, Mary.”
Helpless, Mary spreads her hands in front of her and shrugs. “He’s-charming, I suppose. It’s a bit like Lydia. Selfish, charming people always manage to have friends. And although he can’t make a decision in his personal life without picking the worst option, he’s moderately intelligent.” She can’t quite put into words the way that Crawford’s biting commentary makes her feel, as it’s an entirely separate sensation from her evening with Richard the night before. With Richard, everything had been smooth and easy; with Crawford, it is as though her skin has electric wires running beneath it.
“Let us summarize,” suggests her father. “In review, his sins: greed, pride, selfishness, and a certain ethical laxity. In his virtues: charm, intelligence, and enough self-awareness to value your friendship and the debt he owed to you.”
“The last one shouldn’t count,” Mary interrupts. “He only owed me a debt because he got bored with the girl he was pursuing and slept with her cousin.”
Behind his glasses, her father blinks slowly. “Ah,” he says drily. “I see.”
“I told you he’s not a nice person,” Mary says desperately. “Not as nice as Richard.”
“Richard,” he says gently, “is leaving, Mary.”
Mary’s hands clench into fists by her sides without any conscious input from her brain. She still can’t quite stomach it. “I know,” she says, with a stab at reasonable. “He’s going to be gone for a long time.”
“Do you want to wait for him?” he asks.
It’s a perfectly acceptable question. It is, in fact, a question that has been running through Mary’s head in the many hours since she’d numbly climbed out of Richard’s car and stumbled her way through the garden, into the kitchen where she’d stared into a cup of chocolate until it had gone cold and slimy.
“I,” begins Mary, and then she bursts into big, hiccupping tears. “No,” she sobs. “No, no, Da, I don’t.” Faintly alarmed but unsurprised, her father leans forward and pats her on the shoulder, which only makes her cry harder. “I’m such a terrible human being,” she wails.
Her father fishes a handkerchief for her out of the pocket of his cardigan and hands it over. “You don’t have to be ashamed of that, love.”
“What’s wrong with me?” she demands wetly. “Why can’t I be okay with this?”
After a few seconds, her father pulls her glasses off of her face and begins to clean them with the hem of his shirt. “To wait for a man to return from war,” he says thoughtfully, “you must love him very much. It’s a hard task, one meant for a strong woman.”
“I’m s-strong,” blubbers Mary.
“You are,” agrees her father. “It’s the loving very much part that’s the problem.”
When her father puts it that way, it seems so much simpler than it had in Mary’s bird’s nest of a brain. “What’s wrong with me?” she whispers.
“You’re young,” her father says, slightly unsympathetically. “People your age are always melodramatic.”
“He’s just so lovely,” Mary says sadly. “So kind and wonderful. And he wants to do what I want.”
“Life is full of people who want the same things as you,” he tells her. “Sharing dreams doesn’t mean you’re meant to share your lives, Mary.” He smiles and, now that her tears have begun to die down, hands her back her glasses. “You should go to him honestly and explain your situation. He seems a reasonable sort.”
Thinking of the way that Richard had looked as she’d numbly pulled herself out of his car, she thinks that Richard already knows perfectly well her situation. It’s distressing to realize that you’re not good enough for your dream man; without Mary’s consent, the flow of her tears accelerates.
“Oh, stop with that, kitten,” murmurs her da. He hasn’t done so in years, but he reaches and pulls her onto his lap, where he folds her into his arms and lets her soak his second-favorite cardigan. “He’s not all bad, your Henry Crawford. He’s got a natural affinity for chess. Almost got me during our second game.”
Mary couldn’t give fewer fucks about chess than she currently does, but she tries to laugh for her da’s sake. “I don’t think this is a case of deciding between them,” she tells the buttons on his shirt. “I don’t deserve Richard and I can’t wait for him, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to wrap my heart up for Crawford so he can break it. He’s a rat.”
Slowly, her father says, “We’ve seen some rats in this family, Mary Bennet. I don’t think Henry Crawford is a one so much as he’s used to thinking that he’s one.” He closes his arms more firmly around her for a long final hug. “After Lydia, he should be a piece of cake.”
It’s nice of her father to think that, but rather shockingly naïve. Henry Crawford is four times more difficult that Lydia. Mary would almost rather spend the rest of her life helping at the birth of little Penelope Bennet than fight against Crawford’s wandering dick.
This is not the sort of sentiment one should share with one’s parent. “Mm,” Mary replies, out of a desire not to lie to her father. Reluctantly, she untangles herself from his embrace and struggles to her feet. “I should go-I’m relieving Mum’s shift at the hospital.” She leans forward and kisses him softly on the temple. “Thanks, Da.”
“I love you, kitten,” he says seriously, adjusting her glasses where they sit on her nose. “We all do.”
“I know,” she tells him.
~
As proof that the universe wants this done with and buried, Mary runs into Richard during her shift with Penelope. She does it literally, in fact; as she’s turning a corner, juggling one of her texts for next term and a cup of hideous vending machine coffee, she almost head-butts him in the chest.
“Jesus,” Mary hisses, leaping back and narrowly avoiding permanently disfiguring herself with her beverage. “Oh! Richard.”
He steadies her with a hand curled around her elbow. His touch, despite their impending painful conversation, still drags a finger of warmth down her spine. Part of Mary feels immoral for still being attracted to a man to whom she is about to give the boot, but that part is drowned out by the much, much larger part of her that feels immoral for giving the boot to a man who is about to be shipped overseas to stick scalpels into dying soldiers.
“Hello, Mary,” he says neutrally. He’s dressed in a fine blue sweater, which highlights the beautiful depths of his eyes under his frameless glasses. He is a criminally unfair person. “Are you here to visit with Penelope?”
“Yes,” she says, clutching her textbook to her chest. His hand is still at her elbow, his fingers burning into her skin. “But-I think we should have a chat.”
His mouth thins. “I think I know what our chat is going to entail.”
“We should probably have it anyway,” Mary points out. She reviews, briefly, the many aspects of their shoddily haphazard relationship that have lead to this moment: seven months of quiet pining, twenty minutes of rabid, oxygen-devouring snogging, the best first date she’s ever had, and the RAMC.
Mary has been attracted to plenty of people before; it’s the fate of the human race to do stupid things for sex. It’s also the fate of the more intelligent members of the human race to do their best to distance themselves from stupidity and further the evolution of their species. Mary is sharp and clever and very conscious of her ethical framework; she has a responsibility to be honest with Richard.
“I do casual shagging,” Mary tells him once he’s found them a spot in one of the empty waiting rooms. “But I don’t do casual dating, and it’s not fair for me to say we’ll take this one day at a time, only to decide once you’re overseas that this isn’t going to work out.”
Finally, Richard releases her. He nods once, briskly, and says tightly, “That's very sensible of you.”
Mary gets the impression that he wants to say more, so she waits and takes a sip of her egregious hospital coffee-an action which she immediately regrets, as the cup tastes of lukewarm despair and plague.
“I like you,” Richard continues after a long pause. “I rather-like you a lot. I think you’re brilliant and funny and sexy as hell.” Without conscious input, Mary feels a little bubble swell in her chest at this assessment. “And, to be honest, I’m not sure that this wouldn’t work out. Part of me wants to get on my knees and beg you for a chance.” He shrugs jerkily. “But I’ve got a lot of pride.”
“Don’t beg,” Mary says. A lump appears to have grown in her throat; she takes another swallow of coffee to dissolve it, and only succeeds in almost choking. “Richard, muddling through this with me in school and you in-bloody hell, what, Afghanistan?-would be an epic disaster. It didn’t matter how many naughty emails we sent, we’d both be hellishly miserable.”
Richard flashes her a pale imitation of his usual charming grin. “Are you particularly skilled at naughty emails?”
“I’m very forthright,” Mary replies, “which is nice if you don’t like beating around the bush. So to speak.”
This chokes a laugh out of him. “God, Mary.”
“Momentarily putting aside innuendo, surely you know I’m right.”
The most unpleasant aspect of this experience, beyond the pain that is clear in Richard’s bearing and the fact that Richard is a perfect human being and Mary not holding onto him tightly with both hands is an obvious sign of her mental instability, is that she could very well be wrong. Mary is not, however, prepared to put him through hell in six months on the grounds of a guess.
“Of course I know you’re right. It’s a question of whether or not I feel like being sensible.” Most of the humor leaches out of him, leaving behind the starkness of his aristocratic bones, the weight of his recent shift on his shoulders.
“People like us,” Mary reminds him, “are very good at being sensible.”
He doesn’t smile at this. “I’m having a hell of a time letting you go.”
Trying to be understanding rather than irritated, Mary says, “You didn’t exactly have me, Richard, which is sort of the point.”
This time, he does smile. It just about breaks Mary’s heart, and she hadn’t been aware she was at risk for that happening. Her usual modus operandi of casual shagging grows more and more appealing the longer she is forced to witness Richard’s flagging strength. Knowing that she is responsible for this, Mary reaches out to him. She doesn’t know if it’s to pat him on the shoulder or take him into her arms-she hasn’t really decided-but it ends up not mattering, because he steps to the side neatly, out of her reach.
“Give me some time, yeah?”
Mary bites back a reminder that they haven’t got much time, and nods instead. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she’s at risk for bursting into ugly sobs. This business of severing their not-relationship is gut-wrenching and faintly sickening. It’s as though she’s stabbing seven months of hero worship in the face.
“Yeah,” she accedes gruffly, wrapping her arms around her midsection. “Yeah, of course.”
Richard nods at her and rotates on his heel. He disappears out of the waiting room and down the hall, his footsteps clear and ringing and a shade too fast. Mary dumps the remaining dregs of her devil coffee into a nearby potted plant and folds herself awkwardly into one of the uncomfortable chairs lining the walls of the waiting room. The chalky, impersonal walls of the hospital press down on her lungs.
Mary had expected to feel at least some relief at the resolution of an untenable situation, but if she’s currently feeling relief it’s buried under a massive amount of self-loathing. She isn’t sure if it’s her fault because she let her fantasies guide her into this entire scenario or because she broke something inside of Richard-or both-but mostly Mary wants to kill herself and put the world out of the misery it clearly derives from her continued existence.
Instead of doing something rash and stupid like crying again, Mary spends twenty minutes staring at a fuzzy landscape hanging on the opposite wall before she leaves to stand in the windows of the NICU and watch Penelope’s small chest expand and contract with the force of her tiny breaths. Little Penelope, the Bennet sort of a miracle: the beautiful result of shitty decision-making and unprotected sex.
“You’re going to know all about condoms,” Mary promises her goddaughter, pressing her fingers to the Plexiglas divider. “And STDs, and our culture’s perpetuation of the virginity myth, and why slut-shaming is bad. And also perfect use versus common use birth control statistics.”
~
[part v]
~
iv. | we looked at them eleven ways
With Crawford’s words rattling around her skull like the bells from Notre Dame, Mary barely survives to Wednesday. If not for Mary and Lydia’s charming blend of verbal abuse and sisterly affection, she probably wouldn’t have even been ready for dinner with Richard. As it is, she weathers Lydia’s bitching about her useless charcoal-based organic eyeliner without any comments beyond zombie-like single-syllable responses.
“You’re like a doll,” says Lydia disapprovingly as she and Kitty push Mary down the stairs to the kitchen. “Look at you. Flopping around.”
Kitty, bless her, catches Mary’s elbow before she walks into the doorframe to the kitchen. “What is wrong with you? Lydia’s been at you all afternoon and you haven’t said a thing.”
“I’m fine,” says Mary robotically. She’s having a hard time seeing properly-thus the doorframe-and she comes into herself long enough to blink forcefully. “Is our kitchen normally so lopsided? Shit, Lydia, I think you gave me the wrong contacts.”
At the stove, a fuzzy Lizzie asks, “I thought you didn’t own contacts? Aren’t they bad for the environment, along with microwaves and all other modern conveniences?”
“Right,” agrees Mary, shaking her head, trying to work out the cobwebs left by Crawford’s rant. “Of course I don’t. Why the fuck am I wearing them, then?”
“Your prescription is basically Mum’s,” says Lydia dismissively.
“I can’t see, which indicates that it is not,” hisses Mary.
Lydia flops onto one of the counter stools and pulls out her phone. “Trust me, you look great.”
“Bit difficult to judge, as I am currently blind,” Mary points out. She can at least confirm that she is wearing her sexiest trousers, tight and navy with grey pinstripes, but beyond that she can’t speak as to the rest of the presentation; she was too disengaged in the process.
To her right, Kitty pats her elbow. “I’m not Lydia’s brand of slutty, and I promise that you’re gorgeous. Richard’s not going to know what hit him, up until he decides to skip dinner and just shag you in the back of his car.”
“Car sex is awkward,” Mary, Lizzie, and Lydia reply in muddled unison. Will clears his throat aggressively and hands Lizzie a bowl of chopped onions.
“Damn,” mutters Kitty. “I hate always being the last to know.”
“The last will undoubtedly be Jane,” Lydia tells her, head bent over the screen of her phone. “Vanilla darling that she is.”
“I’m sure Jane and Charlie are having plenty of lovely adventures,” says Lizzie loyally.
“Gah, it’s like trying to imagine Charles and Camilla,” mutters Kitty. “All proper and wot. You wouldn’t think imagining two attractive people having sex would be off-putting, but it really is.”
“Well, thank God this family has some sense of propriety,” Lizzie declares. “I was worried for our eternal souls.”
All of her sisters present in the kitchen take a moment to convey via their faces how they feel about that spot of nonsense. If there were a book open in Ladbrokes about the status of the cumulative Bennet family’s chances of getting into heaven, even Jane’s pristine soul isn’t enough to save the rest of them. “Right,” drawls Lydia after a protracted pause.
Mary forces herself to stop fussing with the hair that she can’t see and grimly folds her hands in front of her. She rolls through a few of the yoga breathing exercises she can still remember, which is not a lot of them, and then she settles in an awkward bird-like pose on one of the kitchen stools. “Why did I let you dress me?” she asks Lydia blankly. “The last thing I really needed for this entire farce was to be blind and poured into uncomfortable clothing.”
“You love those pants, so stop bitching,” Lydia says lazily, snapping her gum. “Ungrateful brat.”
“Yes, because you’re definitely one to talk,” Mary snips back. Things are showing definite signs of descending into outright anarchy before Lizzie tips part of the tomatoes into the open flame of the stove and suddenly everyone becomes occupied in keeping the house from burning down around their ears.
After what feels like half a minute, Mary hears the wheels of Richard’s car on the gravel outside of the garden and, terrified and trembling, she’s pushing her hair out of her face and hurriedly having Kitty examine her for any sign of the soot that had poured out of the poor, decimated tomatoes. “You look fine,” Kitty assures her. “Here, a bit more of the lippy-”
Then Mary’s being thrust on unstable heels in the general direction of the door to the garden, lipstick shoved back into her purse and her purse slung over her shoulder. “Good luck!” Lydia and Kitty chorus, followed by Lizzie’s more sedate, “Have a nice evening,” and Will’s silent nod.
Mary catches her heel in the doorframe and almost face-plants into the withered remains of one of her mother’s potted petunias, but she’s upright and moderately presentable when Richard climbs out of his car and comes to take her hand. “Heya,” he says softly. He can probably see all of her sisters with their ugly faces mashed up to the kitchen windows; he kisses her lightly on the cheek and helps her to the passenger seat of his car.
Everything is distinctly classy and grown-up, which is a bit of a switch from Mary’s previous romantic interludes. After all, it’s not like Mary and Crawford have ever had a reason to go out for dinner in a context other than curry and lager after a particularly brutal exam, and the last person Mary had dated before Crawford had been on campus in Cambridge, where no one has a car or money to be spending on dates.
“This is nice,” says Mary inanely. “I like your, um, car.” Mary hates cars in general and on principle, but it seems like a pleasant thought to share.
Richard grins at her and guns into reverse. JESUS CHRIST, Mary’s brain screams, and she clutches at her safety belt with white-knuckled fingers. “It’s not mine,” Richard tells her casually, as though he often drives as if he was hired as an extra in one of the Jason Bourne films. “It’s my cousin Anne’s, but she’s out of the country for a few months and left it in my care. It’s one of those cars that have to be driven occasionally or else the engine will cry.”
“Ah,” says Mary shakily. Now that she’s looking for it, she can pick out design features that seem to indicate that this car was made to be driven excessively fast. She’s almost too scared to look at how high the speedometer goes. “I didn’t realize that cars were like that.”
“Good cars are like good pearls,” Richard says. “Or so my father tells my mother when she complains about his automotive purchases.”
It would not surprise Mary in this moment to learn that Richard is related to Crawford; that little bit of nonsense practically has generations-old nobility scrawled over it. “I didn’t know that,” she admits. “I don’t know anyone that owns a string of good pearls. Or a good car, now that I think about it.” She pauses and reflects. “Actually, it would not surprise me to learn that Will’s given Lizzie some expensive bit of pearly frippery.”
“Very astute of you,” Richard observes. “He’s giving her our grandmother’s sapphires for Christmas, in fact. You didn’t hear that, of course.”
Fascinated in spite of herself, Mary asks, “Oh god, do they have a name? Like, the Darcy sapphires?”
Richard laughs and changes gears. Mary’s stomach abruptly falls out onto the road; she can’t tell if it’s the effect of his smile, which is dazzlingly brilliant, or the car attempting to break a dozen traffic laws. “Not quite that distinguished, I’m afraid. They belonged to our grandmother before she married our grandfather. She left them to her eldest daughter, Will’s mum, and now they’re going to Will’s future wife.”
It’s odd to contemplate Lizzie as someone’s wife. She has always been just Lizzie, the most argumentative of the Bennet sisters and Da’s obvious favorite. Now that Lizzie works for a fabulous solicitor’s office in Glasgow and gets to argue with people for a living-and Will for fun-she’s not only going to be a wife, she’s going to be doing it in Scotland.
“They’re going to look fabulous on Lizzie.” What Mary doesn’t know about expensive jewels could fill a thousand years’ worth of encyclopedias, but she knows the theory behind what blue gems do to beautiful girls with blue eyes, and no one’s ever accused Lizzie of being unattractive. Will aside, of course, but he was clearly undergoing a brief surge of brain fever due to overexposure to Caro Bingley’s personality.
Richard’s face softens slightly. “She’s brilliant for Will.”
No, Mary thinks, some of the blood draining out of her head. No. Absolutely not. Because everything else in her life has turned out to be an absurd farce, she forces herself to look at Richard from a slightly more abstract plane, like a stranger. He’s not pining for Lizzie, is he? Mary’s the most like her, admittedly, but never were there a set of five siblings quite so different as the Bennet sisters, so most like is a nebulous concept.
He doesn't look like he’s pining. It’s a tough call to make, especially now that Mary knows that Crawford has apparently been acting the lovesick fool since the beginning of Michaelmas term right under her nose. “They’re good for each other,” she says, testing the ground before her stomach has a chance to rise angrily out of her throat. “They soften each other’s unfriendly aspects.”
There is nothing in Richard’s bearing that indicates that he wants to be the one softening Lizzie’s edges. “I’m just glad Will’s not moping any more. After your sister turned him down and he found out about Jane and Charlie, he spent two months in London sort of listlessly floating in and out of rooms like a Regency heroine.”
It’s hard to imagine Will doing anything listlessly, not with all of his fierce pride and a fairly hefty set of daddy issues that Mary can see like a blinking light hovering over his head, but Mary makes an agreeable noise in the back of her throat. “He’s definitely not anymore,” she points out. “The only bit of Will that’s like a Regency heroine now is the lovesickness.”
“And the profligate spending,” Richard adds.
Mary’s in her comfort zone; thanks to Jane and Kitty, she’s read her fair share of purloined bodice rippers. “I thought Regency heroines were usually poor as church mice?”
Richard holds up a hand as if to fend her off, which is one less hand controlling his snarling beast of a car. Mary bites down on her instinctual shout to watch the goddamn road. “I see I’m in the presence of an expert.”
“Hard not to be, with four sisters,” she explains. “I’m partial to science fiction and fantasy, myself, but Lizzie loves anything written between 1750 and 1950, and Mum’s pile of ’80s Mills & Boon novels might be bigger than Da’s collection of Socratic philosophers.”
“The Socratic philosophers have the disadvantage of incomplete preservation.”
The rest of the evening is like a recipe for Mary’s perfect date. Richard parks his demon car in a car park across the street from what turns out to be an incredibly posh vegetarian restaurant, and they split two entrees and spend hours lingering over their glasses of wine, talking about Mary’s classes and Richard’s clinic work. He’s incredibly well read about current events, and Mary has to tamp down her desire to leap onto the table and shout, “I have actually found a perfect human being.”
As he-slowly-drives her home, the conversation begins to die a gentle, comfortable death, and buoyed by three glasses of red wine, Mary isn’t inclined to push things. “Are you going to stay at the clinic?” she asks him, resting her head against the seat and closing her eyes. She can feel the soft glow of the streetlights as they roll across her eyelids.
“No, it was never intended to be a long-term arrangement.” When Richard changes gears now, Mary is almost attenuated to the sensation. Her stomach is filled with the best tortellini she’s ever eaten, and she just wants to bask. “I’ve actually enlisted.”
“For what?” asks Mary. She wonders suddenly if he’s interested in doing medical work abroad. The thought makes her feel with fluttery, bright feelings. At least twelve unsuitable fantasies come to mind. In the back of her head, she can hear Crawford’s dry, you’re only in love with the idea of you and Fitzhubert saving Malawi orphans, and fuck him. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to save Malawi orphans. The education as to the spread of AIDS through breast milk in that area is abysmal.
“RAMC,” he says.
It takes Mary a few seconds to work through, as acronyms in the medical profession are heavy on the ground. She thinks for a second that she hasn’t heard of that organization, and then: RAMC. Royal Army Medical Corps.
“I’m sorry, what?” She sits up so quickly that she almost brains herself on the ceiling of the car. “You’ve-enlisted? In the Royal Army Medical Corps?”
Richard’s face tightens. “I. Yes. I know that I should have mentioned this before, especially because of-everything. But I wanted us to have a nice evening.”
Oh my god. Oh my god. Mary gapes, like an idiot, until she realizes how rude she’s being and she snaps her jaw shut so quickly that it clicks. “When do you leave?” she asks breathily. What she really wants to ask is how the hell he’s justifying, as a medical professional, going to war, but Mary knows that her feelings about pacifism are naïve, even if she can’t shake them.
“February.”
The temperature in the car drops by a few degrees. “You’re leaving in two months?” Mary won’t even be done with Lent term by the time he leaves.
All of the distance between them is suddenly, starkly emphasized. Mary stares at the padded interior of his cousin’s hugely expensive panther of a car, at his hands on the wheel. She had spent months fantasizing about those hands, how gently they’d cradled newborns and guided her and Catherine in simple procedures, the way that his competency had been reflected in them.
She looks at his hands on the steering wheel, and it’s like a thousand miles are already between them.
~
The next morning, as Mary sips at a mug of coffee and has a marathon of Cracker on for the background noise, her father disengages from the crowd of furiously whispering family members in the kitchen and comes to the living room. “Out of all of my daughters,” muses her father in the doorframe, “you were the last one I expected to find stringing along two gentlemen at the same time.
“Da!” Mary exclaims, shocked out of her fugue state, but he doggedly persists.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” he asks, nailing her with a quelling look. “Mary, I thought you were too ethical for this.” He sits in his favorite chair catty-corner to the couch and uses the remote to turn down the volume on the telly.
“I’m not stringing anyone along!” Mary protests. She flushes at the memory of Crawford’s insistence that she make up her mind. “I have told everyone many times that Crawford and I aren’t dating. He wouldn’t’ve shagged Maria Bertram if we-” Belatedly, Mary remembers that she is talking to her father. “Er, that is.”
“Ah,” says her father. He leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers. If Mary had been asked three hours ago if her father was capable of looking crafty, she would’ve laughed hysterically; but now he’s got a look about him, one of Will on the verge of making a devastating acquisition for his financial empire. “I see. So you’re upset because he wasn’t faithful.”
Desperate, Mary clarifies, “Fidelity wasn’t part of our arrangement, Da. It was just-it was very casual.” God, she is explaining her casual sex agreement to her father. “My doubts about Crawford are based entirely on the fact that he is an awful person.”
“In what way?” he prods. “Is he cruel?”
“No,” admits Mary. “But-but he’s greedy and prideful and he hasn’t got a set of morals to guide a housefly, let alone a human being. He likes sexist literature and he barely knows Nelson Mandela from Idi Amin and when I told him about wanting to work for Médecins Sans Frontières, he laughed.” Her voice has begun to rise, both in volume and in pitch, until she finds herself shrieking.
“Not a very pleasant man,” her father says agreeably. “I don’t know why you’re friends with him at this rate, Mary.”
Helpless, Mary spreads her hands in front of her and shrugs. “He’s-charming, I suppose. It’s a bit like Lydia. Selfish, charming people always manage to have friends. And although he can’t make a decision in his personal life without picking the worst option, he’s moderately intelligent.” She can’t quite put into words the way that Crawford’s biting commentary makes her feel, as it’s an entirely separate sensation from her evening with Richard the night before. With Richard, everything had been smooth and easy; with Crawford, it is as though her skin has electric wires running beneath it.
“Let us summarize,” suggests her father. “In review, his sins: greed, pride, selfishness, and a certain ethical laxity. In his virtues: charm, intelligence, and enough self-awareness to value your friendship and the debt he owed to you.”
“The last one shouldn’t count,” Mary interrupts. “He only owed me a debt because he got bored with the girl he was pursuing and slept with her cousin.”
Behind his glasses, her father blinks slowly. “Ah,” he says drily. “I see.”
“I told you he’s not a nice person,” Mary says desperately. “Not as nice as Richard.”
“Richard,” he says gently, “is leaving, Mary.”
Mary’s hands clench into fists by her sides without any conscious input from her brain. She still can’t quite stomach it. “I know,” she says, with a stab at reasonable. “He’s going to be gone for a long time.”
“Do you want to wait for him?” he asks.
It’s a perfectly acceptable question. It is, in fact, a question that has been running through Mary’s head in the many hours since she’d numbly climbed out of Richard’s car and stumbled her way through the garden, into the kitchen where she’d stared into a cup of chocolate until it had gone cold and slimy.
“I,” begins Mary, and then she bursts into big, hiccupping tears. “No,” she sobs. “No, no, Da, I don’t.” Faintly alarmed but unsurprised, her father leans forward and pats her on the shoulder, which only makes her cry harder. “I’m such a terrible human being,” she wails.
Her father fishes a handkerchief for her out of the pocket of his cardigan and hands it over. “You don’t have to be ashamed of that, love.”
“What’s wrong with me?” she demands wetly. “Why can’t I be okay with this?”
After a few seconds, her father pulls her glasses off of her face and begins to clean them with the hem of his shirt. “To wait for a man to return from war,” he says thoughtfully, “you must love him very much. It’s a hard task, one meant for a strong woman.”
“I’m s-strong,” blubbers Mary.
“You are,” agrees her father. “It’s the loving very much part that’s the problem.”
When her father puts it that way, it seems so much simpler than it had in Mary’s bird’s nest of a brain. “What’s wrong with me?” she whispers.
“You’re young,” her father says, slightly unsympathetically. “People your age are always melodramatic.”
“He’s just so lovely,” Mary says sadly. “So kind and wonderful. And he wants to do what I want.”
“Life is full of people who want the same things as you,” he tells her. “Sharing dreams doesn’t mean you’re meant to share your lives, Mary.” He smiles and, now that her tears have begun to die down, hands her back her glasses. “You should go to him honestly and explain your situation. He seems a reasonable sort.”
Thinking of the way that Richard had looked as she’d numbly pulled herself out of his car, she thinks that Richard already knows perfectly well her situation. It’s distressing to realize that you’re not good enough for your dream man; without Mary’s consent, the flow of her tears accelerates.
“Oh, stop with that, kitten,” murmurs her da. He hasn’t done so in years, but he reaches and pulls her onto his lap, where he folds her into his arms and lets her soak his second-favorite cardigan. “He’s not all bad, your Henry Crawford. He’s got a natural affinity for chess. Almost got me during our second game.”
Mary couldn’t give fewer fucks about chess than she currently does, but she tries to laugh for her da’s sake. “I don’t think this is a case of deciding between them,” she tells the buttons on his shirt. “I don’t deserve Richard and I can’t wait for him, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to wrap my heart up for Crawford so he can break it. He’s a rat.”
Slowly, her father says, “We’ve seen some rats in this family, Mary Bennet. I don’t think Henry Crawford is a one so much as he’s used to thinking that he’s one.” He closes his arms more firmly around her for a long final hug. “After Lydia, he should be a piece of cake.”
It’s nice of her father to think that, but rather shockingly naïve. Henry Crawford is four times more difficult that Lydia. Mary would almost rather spend the rest of her life helping at the birth of little Penelope Bennet than fight against Crawford’s wandering dick.
This is not the sort of sentiment one should share with one’s parent. “Mm,” Mary replies, out of a desire not to lie to her father. Reluctantly, she untangles herself from his embrace and struggles to her feet. “I should go-I’m relieving Mum’s shift at the hospital.” She leans forward and kisses him softly on the temple. “Thanks, Da.”
“I love you, kitten,” he says seriously, adjusting her glasses where they sit on her nose. “We all do.”
“I know,” she tells him.
~
As proof that the universe wants this done with and buried, Mary runs into Richard during her shift with Penelope. She does it literally, in fact; as she’s turning a corner, juggling one of her texts for next term and a cup of hideous vending machine coffee, she almost head-butts him in the chest.
“Jesus,” Mary hisses, leaping back and narrowly avoiding permanently disfiguring herself with her beverage. “Oh! Richard.”
He steadies her with a hand curled around her elbow. His touch, despite their impending painful conversation, still drags a finger of warmth down her spine. Part of Mary feels immoral for still being attracted to a man to whom she is about to give the boot, but that part is drowned out by the much, much larger part of her that feels immoral for giving the boot to a man who is about to be shipped overseas to stick scalpels into dying soldiers.
“Hello, Mary,” he says neutrally. He’s dressed in a fine blue sweater, which highlights the beautiful depths of his eyes under his frameless glasses. He is a criminally unfair person. “Are you here to visit with Penelope?”
“Yes,” she says, clutching her textbook to her chest. His hand is still at her elbow, his fingers burning into her skin. “But-I think we should have a chat.”
His mouth thins. “I think I know what our chat is going to entail.”
“We should probably have it anyway,” Mary points out. She reviews, briefly, the many aspects of their shoddily haphazard relationship that have lead to this moment: seven months of quiet pining, twenty minutes of rabid, oxygen-devouring snogging, the best first date she’s ever had, and the RAMC.
Mary has been attracted to plenty of people before; it’s the fate of the human race to do stupid things for sex. It’s also the fate of the more intelligent members of the human race to do their best to distance themselves from stupidity and further the evolution of their species. Mary is sharp and clever and very conscious of her ethical framework; she has a responsibility to be honest with Richard.
“I do casual shagging,” Mary tells him once he’s found them a spot in one of the empty waiting rooms. “But I don’t do casual dating, and it’s not fair for me to say we’ll take this one day at a time, only to decide once you’re overseas that this isn’t going to work out.”
Finally, Richard releases her. He nods once, briskly, and says tightly, “That's very sensible of you.”
Mary gets the impression that he wants to say more, so she waits and takes a sip of her egregious hospital coffee-an action which she immediately regrets, as the cup tastes of lukewarm despair and plague.
“I like you,” Richard continues after a long pause. “I rather-like you a lot. I think you’re brilliant and funny and sexy as hell.” Without conscious input, Mary feels a little bubble swell in her chest at this assessment. “And, to be honest, I’m not sure that this wouldn’t work out. Part of me wants to get on my knees and beg you for a chance.” He shrugs jerkily. “But I’ve got a lot of pride.”
“Don’t beg,” Mary says. A lump appears to have grown in her throat; she takes another swallow of coffee to dissolve it, and only succeeds in almost choking. “Richard, muddling through this with me in school and you in-bloody hell, what, Afghanistan?-would be an epic disaster. It didn’t matter how many naughty emails we sent, we’d both be hellishly miserable.”
Richard flashes her a pale imitation of his usual charming grin. “Are you particularly skilled at naughty emails?”
“I’m very forthright,” Mary replies, “which is nice if you don’t like beating around the bush. So to speak.”
This chokes a laugh out of him. “God, Mary.”
“Momentarily putting aside innuendo, surely you know I’m right.”
The most unpleasant aspect of this experience, beyond the pain that is clear in Richard’s bearing and the fact that Richard is a perfect human being and Mary not holding onto him tightly with both hands is an obvious sign of her mental instability, is that she could very well be wrong. Mary is not, however, prepared to put him through hell in six months on the grounds of a guess.
“Of course I know you’re right. It’s a question of whether or not I feel like being sensible.” Most of the humor leaches out of him, leaving behind the starkness of his aristocratic bones, the weight of his recent shift on his shoulders.
“People like us,” Mary reminds him, “are very good at being sensible.”
He doesn’t smile at this. “I’m having a hell of a time letting you go.”
Trying to be understanding rather than irritated, Mary says, “You didn’t exactly have me, Richard, which is sort of the point.”
This time, he does smile. It just about breaks Mary’s heart, and she hadn’t been aware she was at risk for that happening. Her usual modus operandi of casual shagging grows more and more appealing the longer she is forced to witness Richard’s flagging strength. Knowing that she is responsible for this, Mary reaches out to him. She doesn’t know if it’s to pat him on the shoulder or take him into her arms-she hasn’t really decided-but it ends up not mattering, because he steps to the side neatly, out of her reach.
“Give me some time, yeah?”
Mary bites back a reminder that they haven’t got much time, and nods instead. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she’s at risk for bursting into ugly sobs. This business of severing their not-relationship is gut-wrenching and faintly sickening. It’s as though she’s stabbing seven months of hero worship in the face.
“Yeah,” she accedes gruffly, wrapping her arms around her midsection. “Yeah, of course.”
Richard nods at her and rotates on his heel. He disappears out of the waiting room and down the hall, his footsteps clear and ringing and a shade too fast. Mary dumps the remaining dregs of her devil coffee into a nearby potted plant and folds herself awkwardly into one of the uncomfortable chairs lining the walls of the waiting room. The chalky, impersonal walls of the hospital press down on her lungs.
Mary had expected to feel at least some relief at the resolution of an untenable situation, but if she’s currently feeling relief it’s buried under a massive amount of self-loathing. She isn’t sure if it’s her fault because she let her fantasies guide her into this entire scenario or because she broke something inside of Richard-or both-but mostly Mary wants to kill herself and put the world out of the misery it clearly derives from her continued existence.
Instead of doing something rash and stupid like crying again, Mary spends twenty minutes staring at a fuzzy landscape hanging on the opposite wall before she leaves to stand in the windows of the NICU and watch Penelope’s small chest expand and contract with the force of her tiny breaths. Little Penelope, the Bennet sort of a miracle: the beautiful result of shitty decision-making and unprotected sex.
“You’re going to know all about condoms,” Mary promises her goddaughter, pressing her fingers to the Plexiglas divider. “And STDs, and our culture’s perpetuation of the virginity myth, and why slut-shaming is bad. And also perfect use versus common use birth control statistics.”
~
[part v]