Impartial Certainties
A series of interconnected short stories from my 2018 collection "Degrees of Separation"
Impartial Certainties
(December 2013)
“Who’s it from?”
“Sorry?” He was staring at the small sheaf of folded paper he somehow still seemed to be holding in his hand and had not registered her arrival into the room.
“I saw it on the kitchen table,” she said, the lightness in her voice in sharp contrast to how heavy the letter now felt. “It’s not very often you get mail from overseas any more. Who do you know in Dubai?”
“Dubai?”
“That was the postmark. I noticed it.” She had walked round behind his chair and took her own on the other side of the fireplace. As she sat down she pulled her cardigan close as if settling in for a story-telling session by the fire. “So, who do you know in Dubai?”
“Dubai? No-one. It wasn’t sent from there,” he said, somewhat absently, then corrected himself. “Of course it was sent from there, but it originated somewhere else.”
“Where was that?”
He looked at the first page again to verify there was no clue.
“I don’t know.”
“How mysterious!” she said with a slight lilt in her voice. It was the tone to which she always defaulted when suppressing a giggle. She was - as she had told him on a number of occasions - now too old to giggle. “A letter from an unknown source and an unknown location. I like a good mystery. Are there any clues?”
“Clues? Somewhere between Africa and America - so Asia probably.”
“That’s not much to go on,” she suggested.
“I suspect not Australia - if only because there’s so much about Australia in the letter. I think Singapore, but that’s only a guess.”
“A guess? Based on?”
He looked up at her now, uncertain as to how far he should go, how deeply he should draw her in. He had, after all, been protecting her for so long now, keeping her away from what little emotional reside might remain. He had argued to himself that he had done so only to protect her, all the while knowing that his actions had been entirely selfish, an attempt to seal off the past, to bury it in concrete deep underground as if it were a time capsule intended for future discovery some millennia hence. If he told her who the letter was from - and how could he not? - he would still need to stop short of the whole truth. Her version of the truth differed somewhat from that of the letter’s author, and only he had the full picture as it pertained to the three of them, a kind of puppeteer triangulating the past.
He felt a tug on his heartstrings.
“Based on who sent it.”
“Who?”
She had lost the playful lilt because her urge to giggle had been driven away by the look in his eyes. After all these years - even though they had been good years by and large - she knew serious and she knew sadness, and it was a combination of the two she saw in him now.
“There’s something wrong?”
It was statement bookended by question marks, as if it had been spoken in English yet written down in some archaic language its roots in Spanish.
“Yes, although it may have resolved itself by now.” He looked at the first page. “The letter was dated four weeks ago.”
“So,” she tried again, a slight impatience creeping into her voice. He knew she hated it when he was obtuse. “Who’s it from.”
“Ralph,” he said as flatly as he could manage, looking towards her to gauge the effect of his words. He delivered the whole punch. “It’s from Ralph and he says he is dying. He may indeed,” he paused for a final effect, “be dead by now.”
“Ralph!” She had moved her hand to her mouth. “But I thought…”
“Yes,” he said quickly, though he hoped not too quickly, “I’d assumed he was dead already. We knew he’d had those scrapes, and we hadn’t heard anything…”
There was some meagre satisfaction in this being only a partial lie; he was aware of the rumours relating to some of his brother’s more dubious business dealings - his ‘scrapes’ - however, Edward had been pretty certain that his brother was still alive even though they hadn’t heard from him for years. Death, he knew, involved things like inquests and lawyers and wills, almost wherever you were. Had Ralph been already dead - dead before he had written the letter, as it were - then Edward felt confident he would have known about it. Even so, he had previously done nothing to disabuse Catherine of the notion that his brother had long since left this world, destination uncertain. If anything, he had encouraged that assumption.
If he were talking of evils, of course, then Edward’s little subterfuge was the minor partner in his consortium of lies. Deliberately finding a way to feed Ralph the ‘news’ that Catherine had herself died had been his greatest gamble. Inevitably there had been calculation in it. Since Ralph’s failure to show up at their wedding and his subsequent refusal to respond to any attempted contact, Edward was as certain as he could be that if either of them had drawn a line it had been his brother - and that he had done so with a determination not to cross it. As far as he was concerned, therefore, Ralph could go hang. From Edward’s perspective the relationship had always been a little ‘tilted’ away from him, and Ralph writing himself out of the picture could only help simplify his life.
He had needed to be careful how he handled the situation back in 1993. It had only been two years since Ralph and Catherine were a couple, and Edward was well aware that she still held a soft spot for him even if the lustre of their initial coming together had worn off. He knew that Ralph’s absence at the wedding was as black a mark as it were possible to make in Catherine’s book, and had played on her subtly enough to ensure that she entered it there underlined and in permanent ink. Even so, she was essentially a caring and forgiving person, qualities which had been part of her attraction for him. As a generic skill, he found manipulation of people easy enough; it was, after all, part of his job. People were cogs in the vast machine he used to turn on a daily basis, the machine that served the business - and perhaps from time to time, that served him too. Edward was good at nudging and nurdling, and with Ralph offering no opposition, it was relatively straightforward to get all the emotional ducks lined up the way he wanted.
“What is it?” she asked, hand returned to her lap.
“What’s what?”
“That he has. The illness that’s killing him?”
“Or killed him,” he suggested quietly, just to make the point. “He doesn’t say. I assume it’s cancer, but the letter is vague. Talks a bit about a hospital, his medication, and health insurance.”
“Insurance?”
“Something that paid off. At least that’s how he sees it. Typical Ralph.”
There was a slight pause. Edward wanted her to leave him to contemplate the letter again, but she showed no signs of moving.
“What else does he say?”
“Oh, he talks about work a little. How he spent time in Australia after the fiasco with those investments we heard about.” Edward thought about mentioning the book and Jack Watson, but doing so would open a door for Catherine to walk through. Worse than that, she could walk through it without him knowing.
“I think it’s supposed to be some kind of farewell letter; almost an attempt to set the record straight. But…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know. It reads as if he’s saying his goodbyes to himself; as if he’s laying out his achievements, totting them up, giving them a score. Maybe to see what he amounts to. He always did like the solidity of numbers. They meant something to him.” But now words too, Edward thought to himself, not losing sight of the book; that seemed like an achievement of some merit - not that he was going to openly acknowledge it. The title seemed an odd one; Edward wondered what he meant by using ‘impartial’ in it. “Overall I think he’s angry, mainly. Not with his situation; he seems to accept that almost without question.”
“With what then?”
“Angry with me.” Edward thought about those evenly distributed references and barbs, as if his brother had to keep coming back to them to stay on track, to honour the purpose of his letter, making sure Edward knew how pissed he was with him, and that, even in his final hour, he was not forgiven.
“About what?”
He glanced towards the mantle clock to register the time, then smiled sadly at her.
“About you.”
“Me?”
He nodded. He knew he didn’t need to refer back; scars like that never go away. Just by referencing it, Catherine would feel the jab of pain again.
“But it wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he offered in reply. He didn’t wish her to feel any guilt. He never had.
There was another pause. This time she rose then turned and looked out of the window for a moment. Turning back, she walked towards the door.
“It was everyone’s fault,” she countered from somewhere behind him, then left the room preventing any response.
The peculiarity of his situation was, he realised, that he could ‘do’ nothing. As Edward started to skim through the letter again he was struck by the notion that, whatever Ralph had said in it, he was powerless to act. He couldn’t write back or go and see him. All he could do was wait; wait for the final news that would come one day, relatively soon. It was like boxing with both hands tied behind your back: you couldn’t defend yourself, you couldn’t retaliate. Ralph had all the power in this, his final exchange. That felt a little strange to Edward, especially as he had grown up in the dominant position, always able to direct, instruct, cajole his younger sibling. He had over-stepped the mark more than once - what older brother doesn’t? - but it had not been a particularly unusual relationship, not from what he could see.
Taken in that context, the letter represented at best a final, if pyrrhic victory for Ralph. Too much water had flowed under their individual bridges for it to make very much difference to Edward. So what that his brother had sworn at him, refused to forgive him, taunted him for being just out of reach? He was seventy-one years old now; too old to care. Too close to his own denouement to be concerned whether his brother was dying in Cambodia or Katmandu. Perhaps, from that perspective, the letter had singularly failed; perhaps it had succeeded in achieving the exact opposite of that which had been intended. If Ralph’s aim had been to make Edward feel somehow guilty or regretful or filled with remorse, all it had achieved was to allow Edward the luxury of reaffirming that it made not a jot of difference to him. Even if Ralph had been pleading for a death bed reconciliation and divulged exactly where he was holed-up, Edward was pretty certain he would simply have stayed put and - to borrow Ralph’s terminology - ‘let the fucker die’.
What he did not know, of course, was the effect it would have on Catherine - not that he had any intention of letting her read it. Might she, in defence of her husband, be returning to that little black book of hers and re-emphasise the indelible mark already made there? Or might she - out misplaced remorse, contrition, guilt - be trying to expunge the entry, its removal an admission to something unnameable on her side? Edward could not know. Worse than that, he would be unable to find out; it wasn’t, after all, the kind of question you could ask outright - even if you happened to know how to frame it. He would look for signs; that was all he could do.
Did Ralph ‘count’ in the end? That had been one of his questions. On one level - the familial, the factual - of course he counted, Edward could never deny that. But on the level to which Ralph was referring? Did he ‘count’ to Edward as a ‘special’ person and was he doing so at that precise moment in time? He thought not. But maybe Ralph was asking himself that question; did he ‘count’ to himself? That would explain all the talk about Australia, the book, ‘finding himself’. Edward could imagine, even after all this time, self-recognition as being someone who ultimately ‘counted’ would be of value to his brother.
There were no loose ends as far as Edward could see. He had been vaguely amused that Ralph had once tried to ‘be like him’ - whatever that meant. Ralph didn’t really have any idea about how Edward had been at work, in 1993 or at any time since then. And rather than flattered by the suggestion, it seemed merely another example as to how Ralph’s reality differed from his own. Perhaps it had always been thus. Perhaps as unexciting as he was, Edward still held the upper hand in spite of everything. Perhaps that’s what the last two decades of Ralph’s life had actually been all about: catching up his older brother, besting him, showing off, demonstrating that they were, after all, equals.
Smiling, Edward folded the pages and retuned them to their envelope. Equals they never would be, he still had Catherine after all.
For links on where to buy Degrees of Separation, click here.