The Shadow and Night (28 page)

Isabella looked from one of them to the other but said nothing.

“In fact, your arrival has rather caught us by surprise too, Merral,” said his mother. “I should have said last night when you called but it quite slipped my mind. We are due out this evening, to see the Berens. They are leaving to be with their eldest and his family on the coast.
Permanently.
Tomorrow. It's very sad for us. So we can't really miss it. Can we, Stefan?”

His father shook his head gravely. “No. I mean you can come with us. But Merral, if you want to go with Isabella . . . and I'd understand . . . well, feel free. And if Vero wants to work here, then well, that's fine.”

“I see,” Merral said, somewhat relieved that he did not have to disappoint Isabella, “the decision seems made. So, Isabella I'll come over for an hour as soon as I can.”

The Danols' house was in a freshly painted, narrow, four-story terrace high up the eastern end of town. By the time Merral arrived, young Eliza had been put to bed, and Isabella ushered him up to the main family room on the topmost floor with its sparse decor and pale, polished pine floors. As Isabella prepared coffee, Merral went out onto the balcony and looked out at the view over the choppy gray waters of Ynysmere Lake, above which the gulls swooped, their wingtips gleaming red in the rays of a setting sun that seemed to bleed through rips in the clouds.

I feel troubled,
Merral acknowledged as he looked out over the warm, glowing tiles and brickwork, the spires, roofs, and deep shadow-filled streets of his town.

He stood there looking at the town he had grown up in. As he did, he had a brief and terrible presentiment—too ill defined to be a vision—of everything before him slowly crumbling, as if Ynysmant were sliding brick by brick into the lake. It was almost as though its buildings and houses were just dissolving into rubble, like snow under warm rain. Merral shuddered and clutched the balcony rail. In a flash of cognition, he sensed that his concern was not the loss of his town but of his world.

A gust of wind blew from the north, and he shivered. He went back inside to the Danols' room and sat down on the sofa, trying to soothe his mind by staring around at the abstract paintings and the carefully spaced pottery items on the high glass shelves until Isabella returned.

There, as the last rays of the sun fled the nearby towers and twilight fell, Merral and Isabella sat together on the sofa with their coffee and talked of the news from the town and of the worlds.

Yet as they talked, Merral found that instead of his strange mood being allayed, his unease persisted, but it was now focused in a different area. In particular, he sensed that Isabella was in some extraordinary, fey mood that seemed to defy analysis.

She leaned back into the corner of the sofa and stared at him with her deep dark eyes as if she was watching for something.

“Are you glad to see me?” she asked in her gentle but searching voice.

“Very much so. I would have got in touch with you after supper.”

“I know that,” she answered, stroking her long, straight black hair.

“I've been pondering our relationship, Merral,” she announced a minute later.

“I would have been, Isabella. But I've been busy.” Merral slowly put his cup down. “Still, please tell me what you have been thinking.”

“Well, it's odd. Hard to put into words. Do you see it going anywhere?”

“Going anywhere? Well it's sort of frozen, isn't it? We can hardly do anything without the approval of our parents.”

“No,” she replied, but he felt that a strong suggestion of doubt hung over the monosyllable.

“You sound like you don't believe it.”

“Hmm.” She twisted a lock of her hair. “I'm just exploring things. I mean the whole commitment routine—the traditional formula. Trying them out in my mind. You and I are
special
to each other, aren't we?”

“Special? Yes, we are.”

She snuggled next to him, and he was oddly aware of the warmth and softness of her body. “I agree,” she said.

There was silence for some time, a silence deeper than conversation. In it, Merral began to think about the relationship between himself and Isabella. Then his mind drifted, drawn away by the thought of the journey he faced tomorrow.
Where will we be in twenty-four hours' time?
A vague feeling of foreboding came into his mind.
What will we be facing? And what did Jorgio's vision mean? Could there really be something in the north? Some sort of wild, malign presence?
Merral wanted to condemn the idea as folly, to throw it out of his mind, but felt he could not. It was strange how the very phrase
the north
was acquiring an edge to it. It was almost as though it conveyed the same sort of chilling force on the mind as the north wind did on the flesh.

He was suddenly aware of Isabella's eyes scrutinizing him. As if sensing that she now had his attention, she spoke in a firm but insistent voice. “The whole thing is ridiculous. We can do nothing.”

With an effort, Merral directed his thoughts toward Isabella. “It's the way it is. A parental decision. We wait—what—another three months?”

“And then, will they say yes?”

“Possibly. My parents are very fond of you.”

“And mine of you. They would let me go with you as your wife to your jungle project if necessary. Even if we rarely got the chance to come back here.”

“I'm sure they would. But that, well, just wasn't the point.”

“Yes, but it seems so, well,
sad
that our parents won't approve of us being committed to each other.”

“Sad? I suppose it is. I hadn't seen it that way. But I don't see that we can do anything about it. Except wait.”

“And hope.”

“I suppose so,” he answered, wishing that the pending journey wasn't overshadowing all his thinking.

“I was wondering . . . ,” Isabella said, a few minutes later.

“About what?”

“About an alternative.”

“How do you mean ‘an alternative'?”

“Hmm . . . ,” she replied, as if having difficulty trying to frame the words. In the silence that followed, she nestled closer to him. Merral found it undeniably pleasant with her soft, slight weight against him. In fact, he decided, pleasant was an understatement. There was an excitement about it, a sense of an anticipatory promise. Suddenly marriage—and all that it brought with it—seemed to be something that wasn't merely attractive to him; it was something so compelling that he felt himself hunger for it.

Isabella reached out, put her soft hand over his, and squeezed gently. “You think it will work out for us?” she inquired in a low, urgent tone.

“I hope so.”

“You'd like it to work out?” There was an almost pleading intensity to her voice. He paused, aware that her eyes were wide and soft and tender.

“Yes . . . ,” he said.
Funny,
he wondered as the word slipped out
, should I have said that? That yes? I should have qualified it with “if it's right.”
But now other thoughts flashed through his mind:
this feels so pleasant, it seems so right, Isabella is my best friend, our parents will surely approve, and our being linked together is inevitable.

“You see,” Isabella said, looking at him, her mouth so red, soft, and close that he could sense her breath. “I was thinking that—on that basis—we could have a private understanding between us.”

“ ‘A private understanding between us?' ” he echoed, a shadow of disquiet trying to intrude into his mind but making little progress against the whirling torment of emotions.

“Yes. An
understanding—
just between us—that we are, really, sort of committed to each other. Privately. Just waiting for the approval to come.”

Part of Merral's mind wanted to tease out further what she meant by an understanding. After all, what was the point of waiting for their parents to make a decision if they were to preempt it? But another part of his mind was preoccupied by the delicious fact that she was very close to him. He could sense her warmth and feel her breathing. She stroked his hand.

“You agree?” she asked, her mouth suddenly welcoming, her white teeth shining in the fading light.

Suddenly it didn't matter; the approval of their parents seemed something he could take for granted.

“Yes,” he answered, almost to his own surprise. “I suppose—”

But Isabella had interrupted him by kissing him on the lips. He yielded to her, and the world seemed to explode into something he had never imagined that flooded his brain with sensations for long, immeasurable seconds.

“Oh, Merral,” she whispered, her face pressed against his so close that he could hear her breathing and feel her heart beat. “I do love you.
Thank you.
”

Only the committed or the engaged kiss like that,
he realized.

Suddenly an urgent note of alarm sounded over the surging flood of excitement and sensation that was flowing through his mind. In a moment's flash of intuition, he realized that he had initiated something—he was now not quite sure what—without the thought and seeking of God's will that was required.

He pulled himself back from her, the urgent words forming in his mind:
Lord, forgive me. Give me wisdom. Protect me, us. From doing anything foolish, anything wrong.

“Is everything all right, Merral?” she asked sharply, sensing his consternation.

Suddenly there was a triple pulse from the diary adjunct on his watch.

“Sorry, Isabella,” he answered, somehow both relieved and frustrated by the interruption. “I'm expecting a message.”

He glanced at the screen and saw that the call was from Anya Lewitz. He tabbed an acknowledgement and stood up, shaking himself and brushing his hair smooth with his hand. Then, trying to focus his mind on what Anya might say, he went over to a nearby table, sat down rather unsteadily, and unclipped his diary. He angled his chair so that the background was a blank wall and flicked the screen on.

Anya peered at him over her disorganized desk. She looked weary, and there was little trace of her normal ebullience.

“Hi, Merral. I hope I wasn't disturbing any family reunions.”

“No. Not at all,” he replied, somehow glad that it was a question he could answer honestly. “No family reunions. But I've been waiting for your results.”

“Well, they have come in. At last.” She answered slowly. “They are odd.
Very.
I'd like to talk to both you and Vero about them. Is he there? Or shall we get a three-way discussion going?”

Merral paused, suddenly feeling that he needed to be out of this place. He needed time to think about what was happening—what had already happened—between him and Isabella. “Can you hang on twenty minutes or so, Anya? I'm not with Vero. I think we both need to discuss these things.”

“Okay, I'm around.”

As soon as her image had faded on the screen, Merral called Vero to say that he would be over straightaway. As he clipped the diary back on his belt, he was conscious of Isabella at his side.

“A problem?” she said.

“Sorry, I need to go back down and talk with Vero. We are waiting for some analyses. It may affect our plans for tomorrow.”

“I see. I understand.” Her voice strongly suggested that while she might understand, she wasn't happy about it.

“Thanks.”

“No, thank
you,
” she said, and suddenly kissed him softly and fleetingly on the lips.

As he walked back down quiet winding streets to his parents' house, Merral struggled to try and impose some order on the turmoil of his feelings. Somehow, inadvertently, without seeking the Father's will, he had made some sort of promise of an understanding of commitment to Isabella. A promise that he was not quite sure he understood the significance of, and one he was not sure that he should have been involved with. But surely it hadn't been a real commitment, had it? He frowned. It was more, he decided, that it had been a sort of commitment to a commitment. He was unhappy with that as a phrase, but it expressed how things were. And put like that it didn't seem quite so dreadful. But he realized that this was another thing that seemed odd. Was all of Farholme now running so oddly?