Antonia squeezes my hand and I watch her eyes fill and overflow, tears trickling down like a roadside waterfall.
“I wasn’t aware,” William blusters. “I couldn’t hear—”
“‘Stop.’”
After a moment, the sound of tinkling glass resumes. “Hand me the bin.” Jamie sighs. A metal pail scrapes across the floor, followed by the tinny ring of glass dropping into it.
“You routed me,” William says more strongly.
“And you gutted me,” Jamie fires back.
“How so?” William shouts. “Maybe, had you consulted me, instead of behaving like some petulant child—”
The bin crashes to the floor. Oh God, are they going to come to blows?
“You said,” Jamie yells, “his body still warm before us, you said, ‘Why Oliver? Why did it have to be Oliver?’”
My eyes pop open. As do Antonia’s. She doesn’t know this either?
Even William sounds appalled. “I never said such a thing!”
“You did.”
“I would never!”
“First you blamed me for killing him and then you salted the wound by wishing it were me in his place.”
“No! Untrue! A father doesn’t favor—”
“Oh, come off it, you would have gladly exchanged—”
“I was talking about myself!” William roars. “I wanted it to be me lying there! Me! Not you! God forbid, not you.” Rasping breath and then, “I said what I said, Jamie. I did. I blamed you, yes.” William’s voice is as tight as an overwound clock. “But wish you dead? I love you! It was just . . . the pain had nowhere to go, you see, nowhere to—”
A sob rips through the cellar, echoing off the stone. I look to Antonia, but her eyes are closed. Jamie struggles for breath, for control. “Apologies,” he chokes out. “What you said. Was just . . . unexpected.”
When he speaks again, William sounds mystified. “What have I done, honestly, Jamie, what have I done to make you think I would ever wish—”
“Not that.” Jamie clears his throat. “I mean, yes, that. But no, it was the word ‘love’ what surprised me.”
“Oh, please,” William scoffs. “Don’t act as if you don’t know that.”
Eventually, the tinkling sound resumes, breaking the silence. Again. Jamie, voice more controlled now, speaks. “I’ve heard every other bloody thing. Your disappointment. Your anger. But love? No. That stays bottled up inside you like all these wines, just sitting here, waiting to be shared, enjoyed, but too valuable to open. You’re so afraid that once they’re drunk, there will be no more, it will all be gone. Well, one day, it’ll be gone anyway whether you drink it or not.”
“You’re quite the poet, I’ll give you that,” William drawls. Jamie sighs, defeated, muttering something that prompts William to counter, “Oh, come now, I’m joking. I . . . I do understand. What you’re saying, I do. But my father—”
“Dammit!” Jamie hisses. “Bugger it all to hell.” Antonia and I both look up, panicked.
“Christ, d’you cut yourself?”
“It’s fine.”
“Let me see.”
“I’m fine.”
“I have a handkerchief. I’ll wrap it.”
“It’ll stain.”
“I don’t give a mouse fart, give me your hand.”
Silence.
A long silence.
William speaks first. “I believe I may have made a bit of a mess of things.”
“It was a crap vintage anyway.”
William snorts.
Jamie sighs, all the heat seeming to have left him. As if, having volleyed those barbed words back and forth with William, having purged them, they’ve been dulled, rendered inert. “Dying is awful business.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s not true?”
“You’re not dying.”
Jamie scoffs. “We’re all dying.”
Silence.
“I can’t lose both of you, Jamie. I won’t allow it.” William’s voice breaks.
“You won’t allow it.”
“Sons do not die before fathers. It’s not the order of things. I’ve done what I’ve done, I do what I do, because I refuse to accept that this is my lot. Simply can’t fathom that I can’t fix it. I can’t buy the cancer out of you. I can’t pay it to go away, I can’t bully it away. What have I done in this life that I’m forced to watch both my sons die before me?”
When Jamie finally replies, his voice is strangled. “I’m sorry. I truly am. But there is no order to things. I can’t let you do to me what you did to Oliver, just so you feel like you’ve done everything you can. I won’t have ‘stop’ be my last word.”
“Live and let live, is that it?”
“Live and let die, more like.”
Antonia leans her head against the wall, turns into it.
William swallows, his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth, betraying its dryness. Betraying his fear. “It all seems rather pointless. We fix and repair, fix and repair, only to have it break again. I don’t know what to do, Jamie. Tell me what to do.”
“Open the bottle. Open every damn bottle you can, while you can. Then let me go. In love. That’s what you can do.”
Unbidden, I think of “Dover Beach” and Jamie asking me what Matthew Arnold is saying, and me replying, In death, love is all there is. He asked me how that made me feel and I, stupidly, naively said, Lonely. But not Jamie. No, Jamie answered, Hopeful.
Because Jamie knew all of this already.
After a time, I hear them pulling away from each other and I realize that they were embracing. The sound of a hand pounding on a back as William says hoarsely, “Damn stiff upper lip. Everything comes out eventually, I suppose.”
“Try being with an American,” Jamie quips. They chuckle.
William clears his throat. “How’s your hand?”
“I’ll live.” They both snort at that. “I feel rather better, I must say.”
“If only feeling better made it easier.”
“Well,” Jamie argues, “at least it doesn’t make it harder.”
William groans slightly. “Ever the optimist.”
“Quoth the pessimist.”
They share a chuckle. William sighs. “We better get back up there. Your mother’s probably called the coroner. Here, we’ll take this one up for supper.”
“We’re not drinking this.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s more expedient to ask what’s right with it.”
“You know,” William growls, “where I come from, we drink ale. All this fuss about wine, with the year and the vintage—”
“They’re the same thing, old man.”
Antonia and I look at each other, unable to contain our smiles as they bicker. I point up the stairs with a nod, indicating that we should leave them to it. But Antonia tugs my hand. I look at her. She tugs harder and pulls me into her, our hands unclasping and her arms enveloping me. She kisses the hair above my ear and croaks, “Thank you.”
I swallow. To be hugged by a mother and have nothing but gratitude and joy there; it’s heady stuff. I squeeze her and then, for some reason I don’t understand, nudge her back. We look at each other and she smiles again. She whispers, “Shall we join them?”