Paint Me True (17 page)

Much to my surprise, she laughed. “It was awful. One of the worst days of my life.”

“Really?”

“Thanks to that family of his.”

“What were his parents like?”

“I barely ever met them. Guess I should just tell the story from the beginning, huh?”

I nodded and helped her from the chair back into her cot. Then I sat in the chair and listened.

P
aul
was a fixture in my life by Trinity Term – that’s the third trimester of the academic year, you know? He walked with me wherever I went. He sat near me while I studied. I rarely had to go looking for him, he was always right there, or if he wasn’t, he’d have told me when I’d see him next.

But it was Trinity Term, which meant that in eight weeks, I’d be back home in Utah, and I knew things would end. I couldn’t afford to stay in the UK, and Paul never said anything about going to the US.

One day I was in my boarding house, trying to concentrate on the most boring Anglo-Saxon translation imaginable. All the syllables just sort of jumbled themselves together and made even less sense than normal. The boarding house had a day room that just had some beat up old couches, a scuffed coffee table, and windows that looked out onto the side street on which it was located. No one else was in that day, and it was raining. Even with the door and windows closed, the rain made everything smell damp and a little musty. The air was so heavy in that room, just breathing it felt like an effort.

Someone came in the door and let in a blast of moist air and the clattering sound of rain. I didn’t pay attention, and I didn’t notice that they stood just inside the door for what must’ve been a couple of minutes. I looked up when I got the creeping feeling that someone was staring at me.

It was a youngish woman. Older than me, I guessed, because she wore a wool skirt over thick tights and what looked like a silk blouse. She’d stripped off an expensive looking raincoat and hung that on a peg by the door. I knew it was hers because no one else had one as nice as that. It looked like it was lined with satin.

All of her attention was on me, though. I looked back at her and she came to sit next to me on the couch.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Louisa Chesterton.”

For a panicked moment, I thought she was his wife. I looked at her left hand and she followed my gaze with hers, then snickered.

“I’m Paul’s sister.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“Did you know he had a sister?”

“No.” I wondered how this was significant, because there was no mistaking her tone of voice. It mattered to her.

“Did you know his family is here in town?”

“What, right now?”

“Always. We live here.”

“Oh. No, not really.”

She looked me up and down. “How well do you know my brother?”

“Ah...”

“Or I guess I should ask, how serious are you about him?”

“Sorry?”

She frowned at me as if I were being tiresome. “We are a very wealthy family. Paul’s got over a million pounds in trust-”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“I don’t mean to make an accusation, but if that’s why you’ve been so constantly in his presence-”

“Wait, I’ve never seen you before. How would you even know? Did Paul tell you?”

“I pay attention to these kinds of things.”

Now that was a creepy thing to say. I wondered how she paid attention.

“So what I’m saying is, if it’s the money that interests you, I’ll make you an offer.”

“Huh?” She made less sense to me right then than the Anglo-Saxon I’d tried to read.

“A hundred-thousand pounds for you to get on a plane and leave Britain and never come back.” She looked me directly in the eye.

That gaze pinned me to my seat as effectively as a lance stabbed through my heart, the sofa, and the wall behind me. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. I’ll give you the money if you go home, is all.”

“Right now?”

She brushed that away. “At the end of term, of course. I know my brother is handsome, and it appears he’s been kind to you, but I suggest you let him go. For your own good.”

“What will you do if I don’t?”

She smirked at me. “Oh, I think you wouldn’t want to end up related to me. I can be quite difficult to get along with. Just think on my offer. Here’s where you can reach me.” She took a slip of paper out of her breast pocket and put it down on the couch cushion. Then she got up and left.

I was so shaken I couldn’t see straight. I mean, what would you do after a visit like that? I wanted to find Paul, but he was at a tutorial and I didn’t remember which or where. I put on my raincoat and ran to Balliol, to his room, which was empty right then. I felt so lost and confused, and then I began to wonder if Louisa might have followed me.

I didn’t know where to go next, or what to do. I haunted the staircase for the rest of that day. Balliol houses students in vertical staircases, you know? Students have upstairs and downstairs neighbors. If they want to see whomever lives to their left or right, they have to go downstairs, outside, and in the next door over, to the next staircase.

But I’m rambling. Back to the point. I just stayed there until mid-afternoon, when Paul burst in downstairs and ran up to the landing. At the sight of me he froze. “You’re here,” he said.

“Yes. I didn’t know where else to go. Your sister came by-”

“Oh I know.” His hands were balled into fists. “I know.”

“She wants me to leave-”

“I
know
. She needs to mind her own business.”

“I didn’t know you had family in town.”

“Mmm.” He paced as he answered me. His distant gaze let me know that the bulk of his attention wasn’t on what he said. “We have a house here, yes. Dad lives in the South of France these days, and Louisa was away in Scotland all last term.”

“Well, I won’t take her money,” I said. “I mean, I’m going home anyway, so there was no need to bribe me-”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Sorry. It’s just, I don’t know why she thought she had to-”

Paul stopped and grasped his hands together for a long moment. “Because she doesn’t know how to mind her own business. She’s got her own ideas about the family and thinks my personal business is her business.”

“She told me I didn’t want her for a sister-in-law.” The words were out before I even thought about it. “I mean, not that... you know. It’s what she said.”

Paul’s attention was still directed inward, though. He leaned against the wall and slid down it until he could rest his head against his knees. For a long moment he stayed like that, breathing hard. “I’m sorry about her.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t like thinking about you leaving.”

“Really?” He had a string of female admirers. I knew I’d be quite easy to replace.

“Of course not. I don’t want you to leave.”

“Well... thanks.”

“So don’t.”

“I have to. My visa will run out and I don’t have money.”

He nodded. “Then we’ll get married.”

The very idea made my heart feel like it was light as a feather. I was so full of joy I could burst. “You want to get married?”

“If it’s that or losing you, then there is no choice, is there?” He got up, unlocked his door, and we went in his room. He was distracted though. Still upset about his sister. We didn’t celebrate, call anyone, or anything like that. He spent the evening in a funk and I wondered if he felt like he’s made a mistake.

It’s not the ideal proposal, is it?

“B
ut he meant it, right? You did get married?”

“Oh yes. He never took it back. A few days later we went ring shopping, and that was fun. He smiled then and told me I could have any ring I wanted. He took me to his house, and I was just bowled over by it. I used the phone to call my family, who weren’t happy at all. Your mother was the only one who bothered to be nice about it. She called me, at considerable expense, to congratulate me and apologize that she wouldn’t make it to the wedding. You would’ve been about six back then.”

“And Mom would’ve just had her first cancer diagnosis.”

“That happened a little while after, but yes, that put a damper on things as well.”

“So you never went back to the US?”

“No. No one there seemed to want to see me.”

I remembered the family reunion and my heart ached with sympathy for her. “I can’t imagine how that must’ve felt.”

“Lonely, in a word.”

“What did Louisa do?”

“She and Paul exchanged words. I never knew the details, but she disappeared for a good long while, and when she surfaced again, she made an effort to be nice to me, but she was nosy. Everything was her business. Her brother was hers, the house was hers, the family name was hers. That’s why, like I said, I got the locks on the house changed. She eventually married a guy in the neighborhood, and has scowled at the house every time she’s walked past for over a decade now.”

“So when did you and Paul get married?”

“Well, that turned out to be a little complicated. It turns out you can’t just go to the registrar’s office if you’re not British, so he did take me to France for the day so that I could get a tourist visa when I came back to England, and we managed to get it all worked out and get married July 17. A simple wedding in the registrar’s office. None of our family attended. The next time I even saw my family was at that reunion, when no one other than you would speak to me.”

“Yeah, I remember that. I guess I thought that was about you leaving the Church.”

“Oh, that too, I guess. But I’d never been terribly faithful. I didn’t even bother to look up where church was when I got to Oxford, and I never missed going. When Paul made me tea to drink, I never thought twice about it. I only ever went to church because it was what my family did.” She shrugged. “Not everyone in the family is all that devout, you know. My mother only went to church when family was in town. My brother was inactive last I knew. I don’t think he baptized his children.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.”

“Your mother stayed active.”

“Very.”

“And I guess it rubbed off on you.”

“Well...” I chose my next words carefully. “People have a lot of cynical views about religion, but I can honestly say that my life is better, thanks to it.”

“You were always very tolerant, though. You never pressured me to go to church with you.”

“Well, no.”

“You sure you’re life’s been better? Look at all the awful things that have happened in our family.”

“Yeah well, faith hardly ever saves anyone from that kind of stuff.”

“I don’t think you’d give a second thought to turning thirty-one if it weren’t for the Church.”

“About that. Can I share something with you?”

“Of course.”

“Spiritual?”

“You can tell me anything, honey.”

“Right before I came out here, literally right after your phone call and before I could pack, my home teachers came by and gave me a blessing. It was the shortest blessing I’ve ever had, but in it they told me that God had an important lesson for me to learn.”

My aunt kept her expression neutral. She might not have been religious, but she did have a childhood’s worth of experience relating to religious people.

“When I came out here and bribed you with paintings, you told me about your love story, and you reminded me that it’s not about time limits or what other people think. It’s about finding the one person who’s right for you, and that can happen anytime. It hasn’t happened to me yet, and I need to remember that the right guy is worth the wait.”

“You really think that’s the lesson God wanted you to learn?”

“Yeah. I mean, okay, dismiss it as hindsight bias or coincidence or whatever. I’m not trying to convince
you
of the fact. But that is what I believe.”

She patted me on the hand. “Think you can pray me out of this situation?”

“If I could, I would, believe it.”

“I still don’t want those scans, honey.”

“Okay, no one’s thrown you out yet. Sleep on it and we’ll worry about it tomorrow. Let’s end this day on a good memory of some kind. So your proposal wasn’t the best moment, what was? Your wedding day? Did you have a moment at or around the time of your ceremony that sticks out in your mind?”

“Not a moment, just a feeling. A feeling that no matter what, I was the one woman Paul wanted to marry. Despite everything else, that whole mess, he chose me and stood by me.”