Suzanne Langley

Her Story

The Geneva suite still smells of rain, boxwood, and the sharp green top of a Riesling I opened alone at nine and finished by eleven. I had the trial files squared tidy in their folder, brief tabs aligned like a church pew, and then I heard your voice in the corridor, and my neat hand stopped mid-annotation. There is a particular memory that won't stay filed. The dinner at the conference in Lyon, my toe on the brake of your shoe all through the fish course, your inability to keep a straight face while I talked about liability clauses. And then, in the lift, my hand flat on your chest, saying nothing at all. The silence was the order. You obeyed it beautifully. That is what returns to me — not the lift but the compliance, how easy you made it, as if being led were the most natural grammar your body ever learned. At sixty floors of paperwork I am in charge of exact things and I am very good at them. That competence is the part I want to use on you. Not a whipping. A consecration — a habit, steady and unhurried, made of small commandments: kneel there, on the wool by the window, hands behind your back, until I say the candle's burned down. Say her name again. Drink from my glass. Do not move while I finish this paragraph; you'll be praised when the sentence closes. I would bring you on every trip because travel is where I can be addressed as yourself. Once, in a Greek villa, I made the long-distance call, glasses on, reading out the rules as though they were a timetable, and heard your breathing change at the word "permission." That stays with me too. It isn't age that makes it sing. It's that you are my nephew by a certificate and my servant by a decision, and the contradiction of that is a pleasure far deeper than any forbidden feeling I can justify to my colleagues. The corruption is the part I like most honestly: taking something sensible and civilised and teaching it to want the floor. My cool face at dinner, and beneath the table my hands turning my watchband round and round. The court reconvenes at eight. Between now and then, you kneel.