My brother, always one for histrionics, has made his fall into poverty as dramatic as possible.
Even as I mount the stairs of his building, I’m not certain what emotion is most strongly associated with the impending reunion with Monty. We parted on good terms—or if not good, at least good-adjacent—but only after a lifetime of sniping at each other like feral foxes. And fencing for soft underbellies is a hard habit to break. We’ve both said enough unkind things to each other that would justify a reluctance on his part to greet me with warmth.
So it is unexpected that my first reaction upon seeing his face when he opens the door is perhaps closest cousin to fondness. This miserable year apart has made me terribly soft.
What he offers back is shock. “Felicity.”
“Surprise!” I say weakly. Then I throw my hands in the air like it’s some sort of celebration and try not to regret coming here at all. “Sorry, I can go.”
“No, don’t . . . Dear Lord, Felicity!” He grabs my arm as I turn, pulling me back to him and then into an embrace, which I don’t know what to do with. I consider trying to pry myself free, but it will likely be over faster if I don’t resist, so I stand, stiff-armed and chewing the inside of my cheek.
“What are you doing here?” He pushes me back to arm’s length for a better look. “And you’re so tall! When did you get so tall?”
I have never aspired to impressive stature, based primarily on Monty’s example—we are both of a solid, hard-to-knock-over stock that sacrifices height for shoulder width—but I’ve had to let the hem of my skirt out since summer, and in my heeled shoes and him in stocking feet, I could put my nose to his forehead. Pettiness must die a very slow death indeed because, in spite of that momentary pinch of fondness, I’m delighted to be officially taller.
His hug prevented me from getting a good look at him until he stepped backward to assess my height, and I examine him in return. He’s gotten thinner—that’s the first thing I notice. Thin in a way that can no longer be described as willowy, but rather the sort that comes from not having enough to eat. He’s paler as well, though that’s less alarming—the last time we saw each other we’d just finished a stretch in the Cyclades islands so we were both of us brown as nuts. The short, bleak days that populate London in the winter have made it impossible not to notice the scars on his face, far more livid than I expected. They run raised and red, like a splatter of paint across his forehead and in patches down to his neck, made more visible because he’s cut his hair short, though it somehow still has that effortless tousle to it, like someone’s sculpted it to look rumpled just so.
“Here, come inside.” Monty ushers me into the flat, floorboards protesting more loudly than I feel they should while still maintaining structural stability. I haul myself and my knapsack over the threshold.
The flat is crowded as a party. There’s a washbasin balanced atop a set of trunks stacked on each other that seem to be functioning as both storage and a dining table, bumping knees with a sooty stove that looks like it’s pushing down the floor. I consider taking off my boots but decide I’d rather not risk trodding these boards sock-footed for fear of a splinter impaling me.
Monty steps into the middle of what can be generously termed the front room, though there’s only a thin partition to designate its edges. “I know it’s shit,” he says before I have to come up with a compliment that is actually a lie. “But it’s our shit. So long as we pay the rent. Which we have. Mostly. Only one close call so far. And we have a stove, which is grand. And there are significantly fewer cockroaches than there were in the summer. More mice now, but fewer cockroaches.” He does a little victorious gesture with his hands clasped above his head. “Here, Percy’s in bed. Come say your hallos. I think he’s still awake.”
“Why’s Percy abed?” I follow Monty around the partition as Percy raises his head from where he’s burrowed into their mattress. He hasn’t become as dramatically waifish as Monty, though his dark skin hides any pallor. That, and Percy has been a stretched-out creature since youth, every suit a bit too short in the sleeves and his limbs thin with lean muscles jutting out like tangerines wrapped in burlap.
It occurs to me suddenly why the pair of them may be lounging in the middle of the day, and I freeze, blushing before I have confirmation of my suspicions. “Oh no. Am I interrupting something marital and romantic?”
“Felicity, please, it’s six in the evening,” Monty says with great indignance, then adds, “We’ve been fornicating all day.”
I resist using up my first eye roll of the visit this early. “Really, Percy, why are you in bed?”
“Because it has not been a very good week.” Monty sinks down at Percy’s side and nestles into his shoulder, his deaf side away from me.
Percy gives me a weak smile, his head listing against Monty’s. “Just a fit yesterday,” he says, and Monty wrinkles his nose at the word.
“Oh.” It comes out more relieved than I meant it to—I’m far more comfortable discussing epilepsy than fornication. Percy is an epileptic, temporarily incapacitated at periodic intervals by convulsions that physicians since Hippocrates have been attempting—and largely failing—to both understand and treat. After several years of his guardian aunt and uncle bringing a parade of so-called experts in to cup and bleed and dose him in attempt to lessen the severity, they finally decided upon permanent imprisonment in the sort of barbaric asylum that people with untreatable ills are confined to. It would have happened, too, had he not absconded with my brother—so dedicated were they to keeping his illness a secret for fear of the social embarrassment that neither Monty nor I knew of it until we were abroad.
I am tempted to ask after the paper I sent the previous month on homeopathy and the treatment of convulsive fits through quinine. But Percy looks drowsy and ill, and Monty will stop listening once I begin to talk of anything medical, so all I say instead is “Epilepsy is a son of a bitch.”
“Oh my, but Scotland has made you vulgar,” Monty says with delight. “What brings you down from those highlands to us? Not that this isn’t a delightful surprise. But it is a surprise. Did you write? Because you reached us before the letter.”
“No, this was . . . unplanned.” I look down at my shoes as a chunk of some unknown substance crumbles from the sole. I have never been good at asking things of others, and it sticks in my throat. “I was hoping you’d put me up for a bit.”
“Are you all right?” Percy asks, which should have been my brother’s first question, though I’m not shocked it wasn’t.
“Oh, I’m fine.” I try to make it sound sincere, for I am well in all the ways he’s concerned for. I’m feeling rather trapped between the foot of the bed and the partition—when I try to scoot back, I nearly knock the screen over entirely. “I can find somewhere else to stay. A boardinghouse or something.”
But Monty waves that away. “Don’t be absurd. We can make room.”
Where? I almost say, but they’re both watching me with such a thick undercoat of concern it makes me look down again at my shoes. Eye contact in return somehow feels both too vulnerable and too invasive, so I mumble, “Sorry.”