Page 24 of All of Us Murderers

Fourteen

Gideon’s room was some distance from Zeb’s, up a flight of stairs and towards the back of the house.

Zeb collapsed onto the single chair while Gideon made a performance, greatly appreciated, of shaking out everything he’d brought, including emptying Zeb’s satchel, riffling through the paper it contained, and checking the pockets.

He found two spiders and disposed of them out of the window with a tumbler and a book.

He could pick them up in his fingers if he wanted, being possessed of impossible courage, but he never had after Zeb had expressed his feelings at being touched by spidery hands.

“Clear,” Gideon said at last. “All gone. I absolutely promise you.”

“Thank you.” Zeb felt suddenly tearful, and aware of how cold and sweaty he’d got. “I know it’s contemptible.”

“Zeb.” Gideon dropped to a knee in front of the chair and gripped his hand. “The room was seething with spiders: there must have been a hundred of the things. Of course you were terrified. That was one of the cruellest things I have ever seen.”

“What?”

“Cruel,” Gideon said. “Unbelievably so. Someone emptied a box of spiders into your bedroom, for what, entertainment? What in the devil’s name is going on here?”

Zeb blinked. “Someone put them there?”

“Well, they didn’t just appear. Did you see the writing?”

“What writing?”

“The writing in large capitals scrawled across the wall?”

“Was there?” Zeb wouldn’t have noticed a giraffe in the circumstances. “I wasn’t looking. What did it say?”

“‘Sodomite’,” Gideon said crisply.

“Oh.”

“It was written on a piece of wallpaper carefully attached over the existing paper, presumably for easy removal. I imagine you were meant to see the writing on the wall but be discouraged from investigating further. You’d flee the room and find it had disappeared on your return, much like Hawley did. ”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying it was a joke?”

“No.” Gideon sat back on the floor, long legs angling in a way that Zeb wasn’t going to compare to anything else with angular legs. “This is well beyond a joke. This is malice taken to a frightening level. This is someone who is going to hurt people.”

Zeb put his hands together in front of his face. “You aren’t being awfully comforting.” His voice still had a tremor in it; he couldn’t seem to get it under control.

“No. Oh, blast it. Here.” He rose, grabbed Zeb’s hand, and tugged him to the bed. It was a plain bedstead, no frills for the staff, but a good size. He kicked off his shoes, sat on it, and pulled Zeb over. “Come on. Lie down with me until you’re breathing properly.”

Zeb lay down as instructed. It was cold. They were both fully dressed, but Gideon pulled a quilt over them anyway and put his arm firmly over Zeb. “Here. All safe. Take your time.”

“Thank you,” Zeb managed. He wanted to burrow into Gideon’s arms and never leave. “How were you there?”

“I was coming to find you. I wanted to talk about—well, a few things.”

“What things?”

Gideon exhaled, his breath warm on Zeb’s neck. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll come back to that when you’re in a better frame of mind.”

“Tell me now. I’d like to talk about anything that involves not thinking about that room. Distract me, that would be welcome.”

Gideon was silent a moment. Then he said, “I wanted to ask about how we ended. If that changes your mind, I’ll quite understand.”

Zeb actually laughed. It was a strangled sort of noise, but it was a laugh, and Gideon’s arms tightened responsively. “Scylla and Charybdis,” he said. “I would like to talk about it. I owe you an apology and an explanation, if you want to hear it.”

“I would like the explanation, but you’re upset. It can wait.”

“Well, it can’t,” Zeb said. “Because I’m getting out of this damned house tomorrow if I have to walk the whole way to Exeter, so let’s do it. Where do you want to start?”

Gideon’s breath hissed out. “The part where I told you I loved you, and you looked like a trapped fox. And I said again that I loved you, and I wanted the rest of my life with you, and you said, ‘I dare say I can give you the evening.’” His chest heaved violently. “That part.”

They had met at Cubitt’s. Zeb had worked in the clerks’ office; Gideon had recently been brought in as the new supervisor.

The work was tedious and repetitive, exactly the sort of thing Zeb hated, and things hadn’t been going well.

He had stayed late, hoping to finish a batch of work that he simply hadn’t been able to make himself do all day; Gideon had stayed too, and helped him through it; Zeb had offered to buy him a drink as thanks. It had gone from there.

They’d had nine months. Not the smoothest nine months, not the honeymoon part where you fell in love and everything was rosy, because there had been so much to deal with.

Gideon had spent thirty years choking down his desires and stifling his feelings; Zeb was emotional and uninhibited, and liked affection shown in words and touch.

Gideon was tidy and organised and logical and good at his job; Zeb was none of those things.

They’d both needed a lot of patience, a lot of reassurance.

They might have found it too, if they hadn’t worked together.

If Gideon hadn’t been obliged to cover for Zeb’s failings during the day—or, even worse, rebuke him for them, as his supervisor—he wouldn’t have found them so grating in the evenings, and then perhaps he’d have found it easier to let go in the nights.

If Zeb hadn’t been so drained and belittled and miserable after work, he would have had more strength to support Gideon through his uncertainties.

Come to that, if Zeb hadn’t been so often reminded of his own unbearably exasperating nature through the years, he might have found it easier to believe Gideon could love him.

“I’m sorry,” Zeb said. “I really am. It was a horrible thing to say, but I was panicking. Things were going so badly between us. There was work and we’d had that row and I felt I couldn’t do anything right.

I was wondering if we could really be together at all, actually, and then you asked me for more—”

“That was stupid,” Gideon said. “I know it was. I was panicking too, and I tried to—well, it was more or less the equivalent of asking you to marry me as a remedy when we weren’t even getting on. I realise it was absurd.”

“It wasn’t absurd. But I didn’t know it was coming, and I was so tired. And also, you don’t have the words right.”

“I remember exactly what you said.”

“What you said. You didn’t just say you wanted the rest of our lives. You asked me for a promise.”

“Is that different?” Gideon demanded, and then Zeb could all but hear something click in his mind. “Zeb?” he asked, more gently. “You said you don’t break promises. Is that why you wouldn’t make me one?”

“I hate promises.” Zeb was facing away from Gideon, staring at the wall.

“I hate everything about them. If someone makes one to me I feel sick waiting for it to be broken, and if I make one it’s worse because then I’m the one who’ll mess everything up.

A promise is just wrapping hope around lies, and I don’t want to do that or have it done to me, and we’d only been lovers for what, nine months—”

“I spoke far too soon. I know. I was getting it all wrong and it terrified me. I’d had to reprimand you at work that day, and it seemed that everything that came out of my mouth was a criticism, and I wanted to… I don’t know. To make it clear I loved you.”

“But I was terrified too. I couldn’t seem to get anything right as it was, and then you wanted me to make this great promise and how could I?

How could I promise you everything and not ruin it, not have to explain why I got it wrong?

How could I spend the rest of my life with that hanging over me every day? ”

“God,” Gideon said. “That really wasn’t the spirit in which I asked.”

“I know that. But I also knew I wasn’t capable of being what you wanted, so a promise would have been a lie, and I couldn’t bear to wait for you to find out I’d lied to you. I’d be sitting under the Sword of Damocles until whatever I did to make it fall.”

“You thought you couldn’t be what I wanted?”

“I knew I couldn’t.”

“Oh God,” Gideon said. “If you thought that—Zeb, you were who I wanted. I wanted you, and you are superlatively and marvellously you, and if you didn’t understand that, it’s because I failed to tell you.

Because I didn’t know how to be with you, and I got annoyed about the what, the lost keys and shirts on the floor, as if those were the things that mattered. ”

“But they do matter and you were annoyed,” Zeb said.

“There was work, and your family situation, and you were under so much stress, and I couldn’t even do the little things to make it easier.

I kept failing. And when you asked me for more, although I couldn’t even seem to handle what we already had—it felt like a rebuke, I suppose, like you were pointing out another way I hadn’t been good enough.

And it hurt, and I hit back and pretty much said the nastiest thing I could. ”

He’d been ashamed of that for a year. Gideon had been very conscious of his inexperience compared to Zeb’s extensive history.

To have thrown I can give you the evening at him, with its implication that Gideon was merely a casual diversion, had been the sort of shitty thing Hawley would say to end an affair.

“It was horrible of me,” he said. “I’ve no excuse. And we argued, and you went off and I thought, but I could give you the evening.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean—I could have been with you day by day. Not making big promises, or saying I’d always get it right, just waking up and deciding every day we were still us. I’d have done that. I’d have loved that.”

“Oh Christ.” Gideon’s voice was raw. “So would I. I didn’t think you meant that.”