To Perceive is to Suffer. Part X
Midday sunlight is battling its way past the curtains. It is strange to awake in Baker Street, in Holmes’ room, in Holmes’ bed, with the man himself somnolent beside him. They are both still dressed, wrapped in a confusion of un-laundered clothes and woollen blankets, which must make the scene greeting Mrs Hudson a strangely innocent impropriety.
“I thought you’d sleep all day.” She stands in the doorway, her appearance neat without being uncomfortably immaculate; her dove-grey dress is a little worn but brightened by fresh lace. Her expression is a mixture of concern and fondness, both of which she tries to tidy away out of sight. Her two tenants have in their time been the very worst in London, but she cares for them despite her complaints; like one living above a city street market who dreams of the peace of the country but can never quite bring themselves to leave. Having the same tenants for ten years and the rooms rented yet empty for three after that meant she’d always felt the house was empty - lacking - waiting for their return. And here at last is l’enfant terrible and his brother in arms. Her life and house are no doubt soon to be put in disarray, but her aspect is the more peaceful for it. “How is he, doctor?” she asks at length.
Watson rubs some of the sleep from his eyes. “Better,” he reassures her. “Although his lungs are still very weak.”
She nods; she’s had two children, both grown now, but she remembers keeping vigil at their side when either was ill, straining her ears in the quiet of the long nights, desperate to reassure herself another breath had been taken. “Luncheon - or would you rather breakfast? - will be in half an hour. I’ll bring it up.”
“Thank you.”
A smile and a slight wrinkling of her nose at the musty mix of smoke, sweat and sickness. And at the sleep-mussed man blinking at her, sand-light hair stuck up in tufts that reminded her of her son Freddy in his younger days. “And after, might I suggest a bath?”
He looks ruefully amused. “For him or me?”
“Both of you,” she announces firmly. “While you attend to that I can air out this room.”
That put him in his place. “Thank you, Mrs Hudson. I’m sure we don’t deserve you.”
She tries to look stern, but her eyes are shining. “I’m sure you don’t,” she agrees, and leaves to attend to breakfast.
=======
He is sitting in the bath but has barely moved to make use of it. He feels like a plague-ship seeking safe harbour or the proverbial ghost at the feast: desperately craving solace yet unable to force others to bear his presence. It’s intolerable. It is, he decides, like falling in love all over again, only worse, because this time he knows precisely what he will lose if he is rejected. His stomach roils and he wishes he could believe the lie he tells himself that it is only the waning opiates that affect him so.
He stares at the reflection of the ceiling and of the light as it rests on the glassy surface of the water. He wonders what on earth he is going to do now. Everything had been planned: he’d even paid Chen Lee to dispose of his body in the morning. (Charming attitude the Celestials have, they consider outliving one’s enemies a perfectly suitable form of revenge. As such the Yellow King was quite willing to allow an adversary to destroy themselves in one of his Flower Houses.) His business had been concluded, his death set, and his possessions - up to and including his body - taken care of, leaving his soul to travel lightly on its final journey to whatever judgement awaited him...
Only here he is, nauseous, exhausted, lost and sitting in a cooling tub of water.
Watson returns with a towel and Holmes’ old housecoat draped over his arm; he’s wearing one of Holmes’ shirts and his hair is still damp from his earlier ablutions.
The muscles across his shoulders relax a fraction. He feels less lost in Watson’s presence. (Feels like he is navigating an endless quagmire in the dead of night and one wrong footing will sink him, but at least he knows where he is.) Perhaps it is only the lure of the familiar, the siren song of halcyon nostalgia. Unlikely, all things considered, but a comforting fiction anyhow.
The doctor busies himself sweeping the discarded clothes into a pile for washing (or possibly burning). His manner is business-like, the bland care of a professional physician. But his looks are always a moment or two longer than need be, his presence closer by a number of inches. This, coupled with a certain forced gruffness, gives Holmes hope. He tries to work out a practical path through his uncertainty; there are a thousand opening gambits. Passive: wait. Active: leave. Practical: wash. Farcical: sing. Communicative: speak. Dramatic: attempt drowning. Surreal: lick taps.
Each beginning had possibilities spidering away from it, occasionally intersected by the actions of others. (Down one particular branch of the Active tree is the conclusion that he is arrested for public indecency, since an argument with Watson earlier in the bough means he storms out of the flat without his clothes. On the Surreal path one strand ends in ‘return to Parkhouse - in earnest this time’ - and it worries him that he does not find the thought as distasteful as he should.) Mentally he follows one path after another, carving trails of logic and probability, until Watson speaks and his voice shatters all the careful chains of reasoning, showing Holmes just how fragile and useless they were.
“Is the dirt leaving your body by some hitherto unknown process of osmosis?” He looks sternly down his nose at the man in the bath, hoping to goad him to answer or to any action that isn’t just sitting and staring like something broken.
There is silence for a time as the detective stares vacantly at the water around him, inanimate. “It’s - it’s good to see you again.” His words are quiet, uncertain of their welcome yet desperately hoping they’ll manage to charm one anyway. Holmes looks at Watson, and finds Watson looking back. He wonders if perhaps the doctor knows something he doesn’t. It seems exceedingly unlikely on the surface of things; but then he doesn’t feel quite as infallible nowadays as once he did.
“You should have sent a postcard,” he returns lightly. “The post in London is very reliable, four times a day too.”
Holmes gives an unwell smile. Everything is running on double lines. Watson will forgive his crimes, but still holds a grudge for the slight; he wants to save the detective, but is more conflicted on offering succour to the man. Noting the contradiction, he resigns himself to distance.
“I missed you...”
The sotto vocce admission is something Holmes cannot countenance, despite being everything he wants. “But now I’m back” he slices in neatly, “you’re remembering my less stellar qualities.”
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the doctor hadn’t been, he is now. In reply Watson picks up the ewer of water and tips it over Holmes’ head; it’s lukewarm at best.
He splutters but stays sitting with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, his hair dripping over his forehead in wet spikes. “Was that strictly necessary?”
“No,” Watson declares. “But I rather enjoyed it, didn’t you?”
Holmes mutters something uncomplimentary as he starts to shiver.
The doctor’s mood lightens as he realises perhaps this is not so different from a hundred instances in the past. (It is a simple sequence, one that is all too familiar: Holmes behaves badly to attain a worthy goal. The goal is attained. The rush of victory cools. The Noonday Demon rises, whispering it was all poorly done. Holmes despises the world for creating the battle, and himself for fighting it. It then falls to Watson, has always fell to Watson, to kick him out of it.) This is no different. A thousand times more serious, yes. Different, no.
==========
The slightest exertion sets Holmes’ lungs wheezing, as does moving after staying still or a downturn in temperature. It’s like looking after someone in the last throws of pneumonia when the fever has abated but the chest is still half-filled with fluid. Added to his lingering melancholia, chivvying Holmes into the simplest of tasks takes a goodly amount of time and effort. It is almost four in the afternoon by the time they have both bathed, dried, dressed and shaved. Watson feels much refreshed, although it is hard to say whether Holmes felt the exercise was as beneficial.
There is a tea tray awaiting them in the sitting room with the fire stoked high. A copy of the Gazette and the Times lie beside the tray along with two telegrams and a plate of hot cross buns. Watson pours out a tumbler of water from a carafe and adds a measure of something the colour of treacle to it from a slim bottle on the desk.
The detective’s expression is troubled, heading swiftly towards pained; Watson doesn’t have to look up from pouring the tincture to know it’s there. “Plantain,” he explains. “Three times a day. Will help your lungs.” He reasons that since the plant isn’t noxiously toxic Holmes probably doesn’t know about it.
He contrives to look slightly martyred, but takes it and drinks it down when it is handed to him.
“Tea?”
He nods and collapses into his old armchair with the sigh of one much taxed by the world.
“You have communiqué,” Watson mentions as he busies himself with cups, strainer and pot, trying to ensure Holmes’ attention is securely plastered to the world.
A twist of the mouth, like a sufferer of anorexia nervosa being sat at a dinner table. “From Mycroft and Lestrade.”
There is a gently expectant silence.
“Lestrade will be informing me Moran is not for the rope. Mycroft will be lamenting the fact deportation is no longer in practice but adding that what can be done to tidy Moran away in a deep dark hole and then a deep dark continent is being done with all expedience.”
“I understand that it would be Lestrade and your brother as you haven’t seen fit to inform anyone else of your return. But why Moran?”
“What else would it possibly be?”
Since the man makes no move to sit forward let alone reach for the telegrams and read them, Watson does so. He gives a choked snort a moment later and throws them down. “Spot on.” He looks at Holmes. “You’re concerned?”
“I like the world orderly and quantifiable - I’m concerned when the tea is Earl Grey and not Darjeeling.”
Watson wonders whether that was the instance that had Holmes - in a fit of paranoiac boredom and whimsy - convinced that Mrs Hudson was attempting to poison him. He noted also that whilst the statement left no room for doubt over Holmes’ preference of tea blend, it didn’t necessarily answer his views on Moran. He opens his mouth but is uncertain what to offer. Commiserations? Some sort of jibe? Or perhaps another question in an attempt to draw him out and stop him from forming the brittle shell of wounded impeccablity he was always so fond of donning when in a dark mood. The seconds pass, the fire burns, and in the end Watson says nothing at all.
Holmes wallows in the silence. One hand rubs at the corner of his eye and then is flung down over the arm of the chair; there it knocks against a familiar shape. He stills instantly, eyes alive with a curious tension. His fingers twitch as if they are a separate entity nominally under his instruction, dancing slowly around the edge of the object and its narrow sibling before finally grasping them both and raising them from the shadows at the floor onto his lap. For a very long time he gazes at the Stradivarius and bow, apparently unable to do anything but have them rest across his knees, as if afraid a touch or musical resonance might cause them to shatter. At length his fingers can’t help confirming what his eyes have diagnosed: the bow is limber but the horsehair has slipped and requires both rosin and tightening at the frog. Cleaning wouldn’t go amiss either. He sets to work, all movement light, methodical, almost trance-like.
Watson watches surreptitiously from the other chair. It is, he supposes, like presenting a horticulturist with a weed-ridden garden, or a veterinary surgeon with a sick dog: the drive to repair is so strong as to be instinctual. He privately sends a prayer of thanks to whatever force inspired Mrs Hudson to unearth the Strad and set it beside the chair next to bow and case and all the accoutrements used in its upkeep.
Both instrument and bow are cleaned and cared for in an operation that’s as unhurried as it is meticulous. And when all is done, despite a look of trepidation that suggests he is angling not an instrument but a rabid weasel beneath his chin, Holmes raises the violin and begins to play. The music is slow, sonorous; it would be a dirge but for the yearning at the heart of it.
Time passes, two hours, three, but Holmes does not notice. His attention is only for the confusions of head, heart and mind that may be drawn out and woven into an endless piece of softly mourning music. It may be enough to heal him, it may not, but he can do nothing else but play.
“Why can I smell hot cross buns?” he enquires of a sudden, bow motionless halfway through an upward stroke across the strings, eyes open and gaze slowly thawing to the outside world.
“Because I’m toasting us some.”
He focuses on Watson, violin lowered, puzzlement clouding his features. “Is it Easter already?”
“Last Sunday.”
A scowl as Holmes works backwards, counting through the days since his return to London and, as such, life. “How positively irreverent of me,” he murmurs.
“Bombastic though your tendencies can be I don’t believe you’ve ever claimed to be a messiah.”
He snorts, darker thoughts temporarily chased away by the sheer absurdity of the notion.
“It does however make you a traditionalist, spiritually speaking.” There is mischief in his tone; careful mockery of Holmes’ recent actions is the only way he can deal with them at present.
“On the contrary, I should have died on the Friday and then...” He is speaking and he knows he oughtn’t. Watson does not need to be told his joke was imperfect in its parallels any more than he needed a lesson in Sunday school parables. Nerves and pedantry are conspiring against him.
“Shut up.” There is a measure of strain in the imperative, but as if seeking to redress it Watson hands him a hot cross bun on a saucer, toasted crisp and melting with butter.
He lays down his violin and takes the offered dish meekly before retreating once more to his chair, tucking his feet up so he is almost cross-legged.
Watson is looking at the hearth rug, and at half of a bun, impaled on a toasting fork in his hand. He sighs. “I - I still don’t understand,” he admits quietly. “To me it seems you’re the only man I’ve ever known to attempt suicide out of a sense of probity.” A crooked look. “It’s very Classical of you, all things considered - more Roman than antique Dane and all that.”
Holmes is staring at his hands resplendent with butter-marks and crumbs lying still in his lap, but his attention is fixed on the doctor none the less. “To make yourself something less than you can be - that too is a form of suicide.”
It sounds like a quote, a piece of philosophy maybe, but Watson doesn’t know from where. “In killing Moriarty you felt you’d effectively destroyed yourself - your potential - so saw no recourse but to carry it out for real?”
“Something like that.” It is still a raw topic, like a bruise and he tries to skirt it as best he can.
“You’re impossible,” Watson informs him.
“I’ll have you know I’m merely improbable,” he returns.
“Oh don’t be infuriating,” the doctor chides absently.
“How should I be?” On the surface it is designed to vex, but the shadows in his eyes prove it is a genuine supplication at its core.
“Alive - yourself,” Watson snaps, truth torn out of him because he cannot stand for the detective to sound so vulnerable.
A wan, wide smile and he opens his hands in a shrug. “Cogito ergo sum.”
Such pale flippancy doesn’t reassure or please him in the least. His palm is across his face at a slant, half cradling his brow, half masking his eyes. “I thought you died!” There are so many words to be said but those last two delivered with heat and anguish are a perfect holophrase.
“Would you rather I had?” There is no egotism in the question no be-thankful-I’m-here-now, it is raw and honest in its enquiry.
His fingers move, pinching at the bridge of his nose. “No, no of course not, it’s just...” He has no idea how to surmise all he feels - all he felt - and the cost engendered. The loss. The grey days fuelled by depression and memories bitter in their sweetness. “I mourned...”
“And I,” he says quietly. His fingers toy with his shirt cuff, seeming uncomfortable with their own animation. “Know that for the pain you suffered, I...” He stops, refusing to turn it into some sort of competition like Hamlet and Laertes having their unsightly ‘I loved her more’ tiff at the open grave. He looks at Watson, a bone-weary and eloquent look, his eyes still full of the weight of their grief.
Watson bows his head and exhales quietly, accepting the cold comfort that he was not the only one lost.
“Old boy, I...” Holmes murmurs, deeply penitent. No actual word of contrition crosses his lips because saying it would lessen the depth of sincerity he wishes to convey. ‘Sorry’ is a poor and tawdry substitute for his feelings. Sorry is for strangers and jostlings on the street, for lost neckties and late appointments. His shoulders are hunched and his hands spread helplessly as he seeks to cup that profound absence and gift it to Watson instead.
Watson nods, a rueful smile showing bleak acceptance. “Thank you,” he says at last.
Holmes looks horrified - or possibly terrified - both emotions are so rare and out of place for him it’s hard to discern one from the other. “Watson...”
“Thank you. For coming back. Don’t,” he warns with utter conviction, “ever do it again.”
The Holmes of old would have cocked one eyebrow in innocent challenge and needled for clarification ‘Don’t come back? Or...’ but this new Holmes lacks the confidence for such pushy, brash banter. He gives the smallest of smiles instead, as if they had both heard the words he neglected to say, and offers a questioning look, torn and hopeful at the edges.
It is easy for Watson to read - too easy despite the absence and time that lies like a chasm between them. It is a query asking if things will heal - asking if they will ever again be easy in each others company with riotous words and pipe smoke curling amicably around them amidst the comfortable chaos of Baker Street. He should say ‘I don’t know...’ perhaps launch into a lecture of how a broken Ming vase even when rebuilt by the best of artisans will never be the same. But he does not. For not only would it be pointless, but it would not accurately address the issue. Holmes is not asking the impossible, does not require a time machine to recapture some past glory. He is asking for a chance to craft a new one.
If anyone is capable of fashioning Ming vases out of the aether, it’s Holmes. And Watson would not wish to be anywhere but by his side to watch and lend a hand while he does so. His smile quirks, the bleakness slipping, and that is all the answer he needs to give. “Bed,” he announces, levering himself stiffly to his feet. It’s early but if he still feels ragged then Holmes must be exhausted.
This time the eyebrows do raise.
Watson snorts. “Don’t get excited,” he admonishes, crossing the floor and the corridor to Holmes’ room, pausing for a moment with his hand on the door handle. “You’re not sleeping on your own until I’m certain your lungs won’t give out in the night.”
Trailing behind, Holmes can hear the thinnest note of strain running through the words and is desperate to banish them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says in a querulous tone designed to irritate. “You can’t possibly...”
“Holmes...”
“...sleep here.” A half beat. “You snore.” His timing is comic and perfect.
There is a very brief silence. “Holmes?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
“Yes.”
“And don’t take all the blankets.”
He tries to sound badgered, affronted - “Right.” - and fails.
=======
NOTES
More Roman than antique Dane - an allusion to Horatio’s attempted suicide at the end of Hamlet.
“To make yourself something less than you can be....” - Benjamin Lichtenberg
Cogito ergo sum - Latin: ‘I think therefore I am,’ Descartes.
Onwards...