第 36 页

The day passed in a blur, John gave me a sedative and I slept fitfully, waking about midnight, knowing what I had to do.

John was asleep beside me and didn’t wake when I quietly got out of bed.

With my strength returning, I made my way down the stairs and hunted around in the bureau in John’s study for what I needed. There, at the back of a messy little draw full of old receipts and medicine bottles, was a set of keys labelled simply 221B.

I pulled a coat over my nightgown and put on a pair of boots, then headed out into the night. I was being drawn once more to the house which had been so significant in my life. But I could not have imagined the events which were about to unfold.

I stood on the empty pavement and looked up at the house. The upper sitting room light was on and, as I suspected, Holmes was awake too. Standing there in the darkness it felt like we were the only two people awake in the world.

I let myself in and made my way up the stairs to Holmes’ rooms. I was so fat with pregnancy now that I struggled to heave my bulk up to the top. I panted as I reached the landing outside the sitting room door. I caught my breath then entered.

A wax bust lay upon the floor in pieces and general mess covered every available surface. The air was thick with tobacco smoke, acrid and dense like a London fog. I coughed and waved it away from my face. Holmes slowly turned and looked at me.

He was sitting in an armchair beside the fire. He laid down his pipe slowly, not in the least bit surprised to see me. Though he had turned to face me, it was as if he was looking straight through me.

“Why are you here Mrs Watson?” he asked in a cold, distant manner.

“Because I couldn’t sleep either. I needed to see you again. For three years all I’ve seen every time I thought of you was bones at the bottom of a waterfall and it’s tortured me. Now I want to see the truth.”

“What is it that you want to do Mrs Watson? Be like Doubting Thomas and see my wounds?”

He turned back towards the fire and lifted his pipe, adding quietly, “You will never see my wounds.”

I walked towards the chair on the opposite side of the fire and carefully steered my swollen, distended body into it. We sat together for a while without speaking as the fire hissed and crackled. Words seemed inadequate and futile, feelings impossible to express. A thousand things unsaid hung in the air between us, mixed with the pipe smoke and heat from the fire. Finally, I decided that it was time to say what I had come to say.

“The truth is that I came here to apologise. To lose a child is the worst thing that can happen to a person. To find out such a terrible thing in the way I told you was not fair. I’m not sorry for anything else I said, you deserved all that and more besides, but you did not deserve to hear about our child in that way. I’m sorry for how I told you. It was cruel of me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”

“Because I didn’t know until it was too late. It wasn’t until I saw the blood that I realised I had been pregnant at all.”

He continued staring into the fire, sitting back languidly in his chair, outstretching his legs, looking completely calm except for his shaking hands. He tried to conceal them by pressing together his finger tips and raising them to his lips as if in deep mediation. Tears were swimming in his eyes and he closed them in the hope that I wouldn’t notice.

“I’m sure Watson will be an excellent father,” he said, with heavy sarcasm.

Now I started to feel angry again.

“You have no right to be upset with me, I did not betray you. I thought you were dead. You as good as lied to me, left me to grieve for you. And I did grieve, for a long time, for you and our child. How could you do such a thing to me so soon after Jude? You have given up any right to pass comment on the choices I have made in your absence.” I began struggling up out of the chair. “I’ve said what I came here to say.”

My stomach was alive with unusual sensations now. I just swallowed hard and tried to ignore them as I rose to my feet.

Suddenly, Holmes lost his look of complacency and sprang out of his chair, grabbing hold of my wrist.

“Wait,” he implored, his fingers digging into my skin.

“Why? What more is there to say? What can we possibly say to each other to ease the hurt we are both feeling?”

“Why Watson? You hated him once. To enter into such a conventional institution as marriage, especially with such a simplistic, conventional man is completely out of character for you. I don’t understand, surely it cannot be love?”

I was furious now, pulled free my wrist and slapped him hard across the face, panting slightly and feeling my face getting hotter.

“I grew up. I’m not that person anymore. I opened my heart. Perhaps you should try.”

Holmes held up a shaky hand and touched his face where I had slapped him. He looked so lost.

He spoke quietly, “I am truly sorry for what you have suffered due to my actions.” He looked up and met my gaze. “I genuinely wanted to protect you, to catch and bring to justice those who would have remained a threat to your safety and liberty. I knew that I could do that most effectively if those same people believed I was dead. I couldn’t have let you follow me into the dangerous places I had to go to. I know that you would have if you had known the truth.”

“Don’t speak to me about truth. The truth is that you chose to escape from a restrictive commitment which frightened you more than death. You didn’t fake your death to trap the criminals; you did it to get away from me.”

“I was trying to protect you from a life of misery with an impossibly difficult man. And I was trying to protect myself from the inevitable outcome of our union. You would have left Red, in the end, and why wouldn’t you? I would pity any child of mine, better it died than to be like me.”

“How can you possibly say such a wicked thing? You are sick in some way, you need help. I’m leaving, right now,” I said angrily, turning away from him and starting for the door. I held a hand to my belly as a ripple of pain spread through it. He came after me, grabbed my shoulder and made me turn to face him.

“You are right, I am as you say, very sick. I’m not an intelligent man with a brilliant mind, I’m a possessed man with a broken, dysfunctional mind which is crippling, debilitating and has been all my life. I am deranged, no better than the poor souls locked up in Bedlam. The only difference is that I was able to channel my peculiarities into something useful. I am a fraud Red, but it has kept me safe. Enabled me to control and hide my...oddities.”

I looked at him with anticipation, willing him to reveal the depth of his self awareness, to trust me that much.

“I want to explain,” he said, wringing his hands in agitation, “want you to understand but I don’t know how.”

Holmes took a deep breath as if to galvanise his resolve. “It’s as if everything I see has a voice and I hear these voices constantly, a compulsive babble in my head and it never stops. Every object I see, every person, every mannerism, everything has a voice and speaks to me telling me its story, connections between things, inferences, alternate meanings. I have to explore them, remember everything, look again, and watch. I don’t see an object; I only see what it tells me. And I remember everything, every detail. I have to, as if the world will stop turning if I don’t. Or something terrible might happen.”

Here he stopped, and ran a nervous hand over his dry lips. He turned away from me and walked towards the fire.

“Please, tell me. I wish to understand. You owe me your story. I will not judge you,” I urged.

“All my childhood I tried in vain to stop this, to control my mind. I lived a friendless life because others did not see the world as I did. I got frustrated with them, but I eventually came to realise that I could be useful to people, notice that which they did not, remember what they couldn’t. And then I learnt that if I embraced my unusual abilities rather than fight against them, they became easier to control.

“If I harnessed my thoughts, listened to the voices rather than try to block them out, used them in some way, it helped. My career was born and so long as I kept busy with work, with opportunities to use my horrible, difficult mind, I could cope. But without work, without a channel, the voices would and do consume me again. I use drugs not to stimulate my mind as Watson has always presumed, but to subdue it. I play the violin to focus and drown out the babble in my head. Not to help me think, but to force me to think less.”

Holmes walked back to me, put his hands on my shoulders and brought his face close to mine.

“But you Red, you make the voices stop. You are the only thing that ever really has. I look at you and all becomes quiet. You absorb me completely, you are all I see and hear.”

The fire crackled and spat noisily. I looked toward it to avoid his intense stare. He touched my cheek lightly with his fingertips and turned me back to look into his face.

“And if I had stayed with you, I would have come to rely on this and gradually would have lost the ability to control things in my usual way. I wouldn’t have needed to anymore, not to the same extent. I would have relaxed, become lazy. Then, if you left me, how would I cope? How would I gain control again? So yes, you are right, I was a coward and I did run away from you. But either I would have ended up destroying you or you would have destroyed me. I left to protect us both.”

He came even closer now, taking my face in his hands then letting go, wanting contact but not really knowing how.

“I’m sorry for never telling you that I loved you, sorry for all that I have forced you to endure. But if it is any compensation to you, ultimately it is not you who will suffer due to my emotional ineptitude. It is I who will grieve for all that could have been for the rest of my life, and that’s as it should be. It’s my own fault, and my punishment is deserved. I have suffered in these three years, surely you can see that? But you have grown strong. You are healed now while I remain broken.

“We were alike once, both damaged. We recognised that in each other, an unspoken acceptance between two people who were on the outside of normal, who didn’t see the world through the same conventions as everyone else. The difference was that you could be fixed but I shall always be broken. It is the cross I must bear and bear alone.”

“But you underestimated me, I already knew of those things which you wanted to hide and it didn’t matter to me. It would never have mattered or forced me to leave. I embraced everything about you, you were very wrong to think otherwise. After all we had been through you should have trusted me.”

We were standing very close together now. He was looking into my face so intently, a look full of pain and sadness. He raised his hand and placed it softly against my cheek. I felt his long thin fingers pushing against my skin. I raised my hand up to enclose his and held it for a few seconds before pulling it away. “Don’t,” I whispered as he brought his face even closer.

The tip of his nose lightly touched the side of my own. “Don’t do this,” I said softly but I couldn’t pull away from him. I was still holding his hand and he now wrapped his fingers around my own, squeezing tightly. The whole world just fell away, exactly as it had done the very first time we had kissed, right there in the same room. I was falling into the past.

He was breathing rapidly now, short anxious breaths as his hand tightened even more around my own. He drew in ever closer. Finally his lips very gently touched mine and they felt unexpectedly cold and dry. I breathed in sharply and inhaled his breath. A sharp scent of tobacco and alcohol. Suddenly this strange cocktail and its bitter taste broke me from his spell. The scent of him, once so familiar to me, was now alien and uncomfortable. It was completely different to the warm, sweet breath of my husband which was now as familiar to me as my own.

I pulled away sharply and freed my hand.

Holmes looked utterly ashamed, as if he realised for the first time what it was he had just tried to do. He roughly wiped his hand across his eyes and turned away from me.

“I’m so sorry,” was all he could say as he unsteadily lifted a decanter and splashed a generous quantity of whisky into a glass and gulped it down.

The silence between us was awkward and the nagging, twisting pain in my stomach returned though this time worse than before. I let out an involuntary cry.

Holmes was standing in front of the fire now with his back towards me. A tall, thin, lonely figure whose peculiarities had both made him, and isolated him, in equal measure. I had once loved him so much but in that moment I simply pitied him.

The pains in my stomach were getting worse. A sudden wave of agony now possessed me taking my breath. I grabbed hold of the chair to steady myself, but as the pain intensified it pushed me to my knees. I was suddenly crippled by it, bent over on the floor. Holmes spun around in complete shock.

“Get help!” I cried, “quickly, please, help me!”

Holmes was starting to panic a little himself now.

“I will go and fetch Watson.”

I cried out again, the pain was indescribable. I was struggling to breathe and feeling light-headed.

Holmes considered what to do next, then quickly put my arm across his shoulders and helped me into his bedroom. Another painful seizure gripped me and I clung onto him.

He laid me on his bed. I gripped his hand. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said, pulling him closer. “Please, all that love you have for me, turn it into the love of a friend. That is how I now love you. Please, please try, I need a friend. I’m scared I’ll be a terrible mother, won’t cope. I wish Jude were here. I should have died not him, he should be here. Love me as a friend, please, Holmes, please...”

He looked into my eyes which were awash with tears, breathed in deeply then exhaled very slowly. “I will try,” he replied, quietly and softly.

I was becoming slightly delirious now. Another wave of pain took over my body. Mrs Hudson was summoned and came into the room with water.

“I will go to fetch Watson. I give you my word that he will not miss the birth of his child,” said Holmes.

“This is Doctor Watson’s baby?” Mrs Hudson asked, in utter surprise. Fortunately she was able to stifle her great shock, put it to one side and focus on the situation in hand.

Holmes left to fetch John. Mrs Hudson and I struggled on for half an hour, doing what we could to delay the arrival of my child. Contractions came and went; I swore, screamed and shouted for my husband.

When John eventually arrived, I have never before or since been so overjoyed and relieved to see anyone in my life.

He gathered me in his arms. I told him I loved him, implored him to believe me and that I had come to 221B only to apologise, to hear explanations, nothing more.