Malheur à deux

Hearts in despair may shatter, though it takes but a gentle dove to repair the matter. 

Introspecting, with both arms on the ledge of Putney Bridge, Cicero evaluated his life. Shunned by his daughter of thirteen, from the slanderous enmity of her mother, what besides did he have on Earth? Not his métier, that was for certain. Imbursing him with wealth and financial security was insufficient recompense for what banes it inflicted upon Cicero. He loathed his métier for having entrapped him into sifting through cases upon cases of murder, sadism, injustice, bigotry, and barbarity. Had he erred when assuming the role of a turnkey against knaves, miscreants, paedophiles, devils, and human apostates? How many villainies had he seen go unrequited and unpunished? - too alarming a number to reckon. What purpose, then, did he, or any of us, serve in this irredeemable world of evil and sin? - none, decided Cicero. That black bile - melancholia - had consumed every inch of him, corrupting his relationships with family, friends, and…at least neither his mother nor father had witnessed the wretch Cicero had degraded to. He was insouciant to how desperate this suicidal measure was. It purported to be his sole means of unsaddening. 

The moon, blunted by brumous clouds, silvered Putney Bridge as best as it could. On a freak, the lampposts were unwavering in what sulphurous lambency they emitted. A sporadic star twinkled through the cloudy brume, glimmering and exalting Cicero as an angel. A quietude prevailed, with not a soul stirring this eve. Nor did St Mary’s Church knell a dirge. All reaffirmed his decision. 

Looking down into the swart depths of water, scarce could Cicero demist anything save a tenebrious vertigo. He envisaged how blasé he would be, when enveloped by the tide of the River Thames. Whether he drowned upon impact, or sank petite by petite as he shivered from its wintry temperature, was of no consequence to him. With masochism, Cicero believed he would rather thresh awhile, and let the stilly ripples undulate over him till he ebbed aground. So zealous were these fantasies, that his dolesome pain receded in like manner to how his reason d’être had. All his verve had vanished into the abyss of disappointment. Such parasites thrive on this, and leave their host incapacitated: crustaceans immured within their duress. 

Clambering atop the ledge, a visceral flurry of both happy and triste moments flashed before Cicero; smiling, he tasted the sweet venom of surrender. A gust of gelid wind kissed Cicero adieu. Sealing his fate by closing his eyes, he swooned hither and yon to a silent requiem, and leant forth off Putney Bridge. His body lamed to a weightless exoskeleton, and his feet curved upon their plumy tips as he unbalanced himself. In a trice, his hearing deafened, his vision blinded, tears bedewed his cheeks, and his problems remitted. With one foot over the ledge, he began to step through to what realm lies hereafter…“Stop!” yelled a womanly, remote voice, heedful of not startling Cicero into plunging riverward. 

Cicero halted, still equalising upon one foot as if a funambulist, and refusing to face her. 

“You needn’t do it.” said she, mellowing any vocal truculence she may have misemployed beforehand. 

“We do not know each other,” replied Cicero, resenting her for having intruded, “therefore, what makes you so sure of what is best for me.” Out of obstinacy, Cicero was yet to desist from his funambulism, and a heavy stupor was now drowsing the muscles in his extended leg. 

“It is not specific to you - suicide is never the answer.” 

“If you are here to moralise, then be on your way!” exclaimed Cicero. 

The woman was impermeable to Cicero’s effrontery and, being cautious, crept nearer to where he was. Flanking Cicero, she continued:

 “Will you not even look at me?” 

This sentence ruffled the hairs on Cicero’s nape, piquing a quizzical interest for, indeed, whom this innominate phantasm may be. She did sound sincere, and implored such tender tunes. Mulish, however, Cicero gazed at the nightly vacuum in his fore, favouring the Reaper’s scythe, as his strength enfeebled. 

Behind Cicero, she mulled on what might disarm him from leaping. It was evident how she had fired Cicero by accident, and could not endanger the situation further by appending more fuel to his flames. In earnest she thus sedated Cicero: 

“I know you think I am ignorant, and unaware of how desolate you feel. You even might regard me as selfish for hampering what you see as your only solace left.” 

Triturating his teeth, Cicero swallowed mounds of mucus secreting from his nose to his throat. A fount of tears welled throughout his retinas, as all his miseries of yore collated and irised before him. Indeed, suicide seemed to be his only solace. 

“If I may,” continued she, with uttermost docility, “what has led you to this desperation?” 

Cicero could hear how approximate she now was to him. When she had been afar, on the other side of Putney Bridge from him, her words were alienable, however, her present vicinage endued her with irrefragable suasion. Cicero was now unable to divest her of her humanity. Still feigning impassivity, Cicero declaimed: 

“None of your business - do not make me repeat myself when I said be off with you!” 

Her forbearance waned from his temerity. “You view me as being incapable of sympathising or relating. Your prejudgements are incorrect. My compassion for you is not selfish, not driven by a mental compass that orders me to try to dissuade you; or else I am an immoral person.” “Am I obliged to commend you for such heroism!” interjected Cicero, attempting to revivify his brawn to execute himself again. 

Her diplomacy was effaced, as she commenced being panged by the reluming of her own misfortune. Stifling her sorrow, she amplified her assertion:

“Spurn me if it pleases you, but I am luckless enough to be affected by the outcome of suicide. Every day, I am swamped by continual guilt of how it panned out. I blame none besides I. That is what bane shall rain on those closest to you, if you fordo yourself. They will never be acquitted of what heartache you foisted upon them. Do you realise the destruction it havocs? The train of death that follows.”  

At last, his soporous leg was unbeguiled of its suspension, and Cicero steadied both feet on the ledge. An involuntary sob fortissimo mewled out of him, as his mind prevised ghastly pictures of his daughter of thirteen, either pitching upon a coppery gibbet rusted by tetanus, or viscid blood ensanguining from her veins having been riven. Enhorrored, Cicero keened aloud, but did acknowledge what question she had posed. 

Having established a sombre commonality between them, she resorted to persist in piercing him with poignancy. “Have you a child? Daughter or,” before she could mention the alternative sex, Cicero wept in rampageous floods. Trembling upon the ledge, he careened back and forth, fevering from delirium. Noticing this, she knew she had to assuage him, lest he founder from a misstep. “You have a daughter,” said she, with her silken chords. “I have a son, whom I never see. He is called Dumas.” 

Intrigued, Cicero widened his breadth of listening to her, as links between them were limning an implicit web of pathos.

 “What is your daughter’s name?” 

“Perenna.” 

“Do you see her often?” 

His cries and tremulations waxed, as he recollected how Perenna had told him to cease picking her up after school. “Not since last year.” 

“Why?” 

“Her mother and I are divorced, and we separated on acrimonious terms.” As if unbosoming to a superlunary priest, Cicero hallucinated into treating his confession as a shrift. “My ex-wife feeds Perenna with lies and rancour of whom I am, how malevolent I was in our marriage, and whatsoever else thereby incurring hateful sentiments into my own child.” 

Like an umpire, she mediated the hymeneal culpability by recriminating Cicero. “Are you innocent, though? Can you claim to have played no part in this?” 

“I am not blameless,” admitted Cicero, smote by her scathing candour. “My profession estranged me into being spiteful and reclusive.” 

“It takes two to torment. Did you try to resolve what burdened you?” 

“No,” sniffled Cicero, “I cowered away from doing so.” 

“That is conscionable, to a degree. Few are courageous enough to delve into the root of their rot.” A hiatus hushed them for, in the crepuscular distance, a gaudy vehicle flaunted its discordant exhaust by blustering and revving. The clamour of the vehicle swerved down Lower Richmond Road, and all returned to silence. 

“What was your profession?” she resumed, glimpsing past Cicero at what defogged as an increscent moon. 

“I worked as a prosecutor, and blundered at apprehending criminals. It nettles me to count how many I saw walk - vindicated, notwithstanding their egregious crimes.” 

“It is easier for me to evangelise so, then it is for you to confide in it, though if you impute every failure and mishap to yourself, there comes a time when you shall collapse from it all. Our bodies have a limit to what weight they can shoulder. If you engorge on reproach, you shall be bloated with depreciation.” 

An audible suspiration sighed from Cicero, as he concurred with yet more of her wisdom. All the while he was brooding over her appearance: what did this unchristened sibyl look like? Was she as fair as her words? 

“Besides,” she countermanded, “I find your statement of their crimes being egregious to be hypocritical. What you were in the midst of committing would be inexcusable to Perenna. Not in a perverted sense, but nonetheless wrongful. In fact, I hazard that even your ex-wife would be distraught by it.” 

Cicero, heretofore acquiescing with her, was chagrined by how presumptuous she had been, when thinking his ex-wife would care if bereft of him. She had not baulked his ex-wife’s vitriol, nor her incessant fulminating at his marital and parental negligence. It was he who had endured her wrath in the veriest flesh, and been rifted from Perenna in consequence. “You have no clue what my ex-wife is like! Not in the slightest!” exclaimed Cicero, as his tears volatilised with what anger had been roused. 

Unirked, she quelled Cicero: 

“No, I do not, however, I understand human nature. Your ex-wife is hurt, and pining for what I devise to have once been a joyful union.” 

Cicero could neither retaliate nor rebuff this observation, for it was veracious. Fascination entreated him to look at this mysterious woman, but Cicero refrained from unfettering so. Instead, he gawked at the empyrean where those brumous clouds were dispelling, and the impassable dark lightening to a subtle navy. The morning was a way yet, nevertheless, its omnipresence loomed. With his vision illusioning from the empyrean, Cicero beheld memories of when he and his ex-wife first romanced; when Cicero first whetted her lips with a blest kiss that enkindled their lovesome passion of old. O’ how fast does that ardent flame between two quench, lamented Cicero to himself. Rheum poured from him, as Cicero wished he could retrograde back to the halcyon days before Perenna had exiled him. Alas, he could dream and wish all he wanted, for nothing can be reversed once done. 

“Shall I tell you what happened to me?” said she, embarking upon the ledge, and standing aside Cicero. Nonplussed by her confidence, his eyes redoubled their concentration on St Mary’s Church. Cicero fretted over having to confront this mystic. The nigher she was to him, the more impuissant he felt against her virtuous, kindly charm. 

She, despite being unanswered, avouched her tale: 

“I, too, was once wedded to someone, whom I loved very much. We had been together since university, and for the longest while neither of our affections dwindled. After bearing a child - my son, Dumas - our relationship strained as we fought to remain intimate. I cavilled at him being remiss, since he devolved all of the filial duties to me. Was it just for me to be crowned as the servile wife? - not at all,” notwithstanding her having proclaimed this with conviction, her fluency faltered aslant from compunction. “We disputed at length, till our bond unravelled; though neither of us were mettlesome enough to call for a divorce. As time aggravated our strife, I drifted from him, and my fidelity wandered elsewhere. I might add that my ex-husband had not lost his love for me. It still roiled bright, perhaps all the more so.” 

Meanwhile, Cicero, as though sulking, now glowered at St Mary’s Church, striving ever so hard to embattle what dolorifuge was being fructified throughout his being. 

“I have forgotten the number of men I slept with, during those days I now regret. I sought an escape from the present, though I did so through wanton disloyalty.” 

With tact, and embraved, Cicero asked: 

“Did your son know?” 

“When my deceit was unveiled, Dumas must have been eleven. With hindsight, I am amazed by how oblivious my ex-husband was to these affairs. In response to you, however, Dumas discovered in due course. What first occurred was, through my guilt oppressing, I bared all the sordid details to my ex-husband. Where I had anticipated him to sever our marriage, he was dumb and ruminant instead. For a fortnight hence, my confession was submersed from buoying to the surface, and life appeared to be inordinate in its normality.” As the zenith of her tale now brisked abreast, her voice mourned with plangency. “One evening, I was cooking dinner when a howl bellowed from upstairs. I recognised whom it belonged to: my son. Rushing up as the howls intensified and multiplied, I arrived at my bedroom, where, indeed, Dumas was. Crying, he was reading a suicide note written by his father, that denounced my adultery. Behind him, his father depended from the ceiling…swinging…swinging.” 

With her visage furrowing and wincing, she languished over what she had resurrected after having left it to lie abed in her mind. 

Cicero desponded at her woes, whilst commiserating with how plagued her thoughts must be. He knew the viscera of such a scene. From his own métier, he had seen innumerable persons behang themselves to elude justice. The circumstances may have been different for her ex-husband, nevertheless, it blossomed his empathy to be aplenty for who was now revealed as being a widow. 

At last, Cicero demitted his vigil over St Mary’s Church, and was transfixed on examining the features of the widow. With her hair being impalpable in the night, he deciphered it as being raven or black. Her complexion contrasted, and was snowed in a soft hue of white. By dint of the lamppost, Cicero could discern a frown marring what winsome attributes of hers were appreciable. Of greater importance was her beauteous, imperfect soul; it eschewed all of his melancholia. 

Timorous yet electrified by their malheur à deux, Cicero snuck along the ledge to comfort her. Once abutting, he extended his arm to enfold around the palm of her hand. Before Cicero could speak, endeared by him, she concluded of her own accord: 

“Both Dumas and I’s mental health plummeted from the suicide, and soon the teachers remarked how secluded Dumas had become. When they queried him, he averred that I was menacing him, and had harried his father into abjection, hence his sole recourse having been to end it all. Without conferring with me, the school telephoned and informed social services. I wrestled with the prospect of Dumas being robbed from me - which lasted about a month or two - to no avail. I was denuded of my son, after their ‘thorough’ investigation judged me to be meritless, and inapt as a mother. My deserts were unappealable. Being widowed and childless was final.” 

She glared into the swart depth of the River Thames, seething with envy at whomever had reared her son. “When reflecting on it now, I know I ought to have been honest.” She paused, respiring some furor air. “I am not professing all of this for you to console or condole me. Rather, what I am trying to convey is that we cannot be mired by our mistakes. We must conquer by means of change, not rue the day we faulted, and nor should we surrender to the delusion of suicide being beneficial.” 

His sympathies were rent ajar by her sufferance; tightening his clasp over her palm, he revoked the frivolity of salting some useless pittance as a medium of allaying her. Somewhiles, the trustiest remedy is silence. Language but muddles and meddles with mutual understanding. 

Enlightened, moreover, Cicero fathomed her intended meaning. He now foreknew what afflictions he would ravage, if he was to extinguish himself. This fallacious happiness was disenchanted of its idyllic glamour. She had flowered his etiolated hope from its atrophy, nutrifying it to spring and soar as enamourment coddled him. Leaping to his death was untempting. It would be wasteful for him to do so, when he could spend the remainder of the night with this phantasmal woman. 

“What is your name?” inquired Cicero. 

Addressing Cicero, she unpuzzled him of her anonymity: 

“Hypatia.” 

“Well, Hypatia, would you care to join me for a walk? Perhaps, from here to Richmond.”  

Her white complexion crimsoned in the navy gloaming. “I would be delighted to.” 

Once off the ledge, they warmed their hearts by embracing, with neither venturing to kiss the other. Unconcerned by the thought of hurrying, they preferred to idle at blithesome leisure. If an occasion arose for them to kiss, they would. Their morrows had faith in the stars. 

With their hands soldered together, wending to and fro along the Thames Path to Richmond, they forfended what maladies had so grieved them. All the while the moon frittered out, as the sun torched the horizon. 

None can be certain whether Cicero and Hypatia were predestined to betroth, though they doubtless befriended one another, and that sufficed them.