第9章 The Distance Between Two Coughs

The test she set for her husband was small and cruel, and she set it anyway, because she had been raised by silence and had learned that the only way to check a lock is to try it. She waited until Sunday evening, when the rain had stopped and the studio light was on under the door and the second movement was on his breath, and she called him out to the kitchen on the excuse of a jammed drawer. He came, and stood where she could place him by the radiator's tick and the small shift of the floorboard under his left heel, and she asked him the question a good listener asks and a bad one answers. "Say the thing," she said. "The thing you say in the dark. Say it to me now." She had rehearsed the test the way she rehearsed everything, by ear, in the kitchen, with the door closed. A test is a small interrogation, and an interrogation, done wrong, tells the person more about the questioner than the questioned. So she waited for the hollow hour, when the building breathed out and the studio light was on and the second movement was on his breath, and she called him out on the excuse of a jammed drawer, and she set the room the way she set a piano, checking the tick of the radiator and the shift of the floorboard and the exact small sound his left heel made on the boards, so that she would know him by the room and not by the voice, because the voice, now, was the thing in doubt. He did not ask which thing. That was the first answer. Six years of marriage and she had never once had to explain herself to him, and he said it now, exactly, in the warm low register that had said her name from the stairwell, and he finished every word, and there was no swallow, no drag, no ring, no seam she could find. "Again," she said. He said it again, and it was the same, and it was perfect. And perfect, on that Sunday, was the problem, because the voice in the stairwell had also been perfect, and perfection was the one thing a real person's voice never quite achieved. A real person's voice arrives with the day in it. Its owner's coffee, its owner's cold, the small roughness at seven in the evening that a throat acquires by usage, a cough in the middle where the breath wants one. Coralie listened for the day in her husband's voice and could not find it, and she knew, with the certainty that only ever came to her through her ears, that the man across the kitchen was giving her a performance, and that the performance was for her. "You're listening to me like I'm a stranger," Lorcan said, and his voice changed when he said it, softened into the thing it was when he was hurt, and that was real, and the realness of the hurt cut her worse than any lie. "I'm listening the way I listen," she said. "No. You're listening the way you listen to a client who's lying about the piano's history." He pulled out a chair and sat, and the chair told on him, and she hated that the chair was on his side now. "Cor, I know what this week has done to you. I'm not blind to it. But I'm your husband." "And the man who called me is a voice actor. And you're a voice actor. And I cannot see your face." The room was quiet. She heard the kettle's ghost click, the tick of the radiator, the downstairs cello starting up, patient as ever, on the far side of the floor. And she heard Lorcan breathe, and in the breathing she heard the thing she had been dreading since the first night, which was a hesitation placed exactly where an honest man would not need one. "I want to tell you something," he said. "Then tell it." "I was at Dunkery on Thursday." The floor held. The building held. Coralie held, the way you hold when a chord resolves into the one note you did not want, the note that is wrong and inevitable and in tune. "You told me you were at a session on the south bank." "I was at a session on the south bank. The session was at Dunkery." He was speaking faster now, the words going down flat and level, the way he spoke when he was telling the truth and knew it would cost him. "It was an audition, sort of. A man there is putting together a company, a small one, dubbing for those crime programs, the ones that reconstruct old cases. He wanted the narrator. He wanted someone who could sound like a hundred men. It's beneath what I used to do and it pays well and I didn't tell you because every time I take a job like that you ask me if I'm happy, and I am not happy, Cor, and I didn't want to say it out loud." "Who is the man?" "His name is Emrys. Emrys Rellick. He runs the place since the old owner died." Coralie put both hands flat on the table and held on, because the table was the only thing in the flat that was still telling her the truth. "The nephew who came to my door. The man who drank my tea. He is the man who runs the studio where Sylvie heard the man with three voices, and he is the man who hired my husband, and he is the man who told me he was family to a woman who had no sister." Lorcan was very still. Then, quietly, "Sylvie had a sister. She used to talk about her. The one in the north, the one she hadn't seen in years." "She had no sister, Lorcan." Coralie's voice was not shaking, and she was proud of that. "Harewood checked. There is no sister and no nephew and no family at all. There is a man who chose a name that would let him stand in Sylvie's kitchen and tell me she wrote about me in letters, and there is a man who chose to hire you, and there is a man who has been building himself a house out of the voices of everyone I love, and he has been doing it since the day she died." She set the pen down and looked at the two columns of the card, the side she had written in six years of listening and the side she had written in the last ten minutes, and she understood that she had just built the same trap she had built for a stranger, only this time the stranger was the man who had promised, in a courthouse, to love her for the rest of his life. Whatever the answer turned out to be, the building of the trap was already a kind of loss, and she could not unbuild it, and she could not pretend she had not made it, and the only honest thing left was to ask the question plainly and take the answer straight to the face she could not see. She heard him stand. She heard him cross to her, and she heard the day come back into his voice, the rough real day, and when he spoke again he sounded like a man who had just understood the shape of his own life. "Then I have been working for him for two weeks," Lorcan said. "And I have been sitting in a room with him. And I have been giving him my voice." "Yes," said Coralie. "You have." ---