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When he is older, able to walk and speak, think in small ways, Mama takes him walking. A hand, gloved in black – like a veil, touches his shoulder, briefly, guiding. He follows his mother’s direction, not yet old enough for knowing disobedience; besides, he knows it makes Mama happy to have her way. Aunt Edith says this often.
Mama does not say anything on these walks – which are, in truth, just small circles around the nearest corners of the yard. He is not yet old enough to find his way to the perimeter, and George is only just beginning to understand looks and silences. But this one, this look, his mother’s hand against his coat, is familiar in the way his heartbeat is. Mama was silent in this way that time she led him between rows of stones, stood, still and unmoving, before a single grave. They had set down roses and George had been careful not to prick his fingers.
This silence occurred once, too, when Mama and had found him staring at a small photo. She had said, This is your father, and then nothing.
When he had placed the roses down above the earth where he knew his father slept, his hands had been red and stung by cold. George had not felt a thing.
Like most things, George begins life very young, but, in some ways, very old. The idea of him existed long before there was a single bone in his body. The idea of the male heir, the idea of a son; the warm thought his grandfather took to bed every night, until the ember snuffed out, until the dream became coal. His father, George is told, his father filled that space for a time. Was a son.
George confuses the word son and sun. His father was his grandfather’s son – in law. His father was a lawyer. His father was a sun. With the same, goldburnt hair. His father, his grandfther’s son, lived like a sun, bright and short. His father was warm. His father set, laid to rest in a cemetery to the west of Downton. Downton was cold after that, he is told. It was night for a very long time.
Later, George will leave Downton in uniform for the first time, the imprint of his mother’s hand pressed deep into hers, such good luck held in his hand, as though it’s something he can keep. (He doesn’t know that yet, doesn’t know of anything he can’t hold, can’t have.) He walks, solitary, through the yard, something sunken in the dirt, something brittle in the wind. George walks through the shadow of the turrets, the drawn windows, the spikes and spires of the Abbey; the entire shadow will feel like stone, the only solid ground he’ll know for some time to come. The solidest ground his feet will ever touch.
He will not be afraid, not yet, not the first time, because he is a son and he is a sun, and both of them, he knows, return. He will smile, affectionately, at the way his mother’s hand will grip his too harshly (this is how he’ll know she wants to cry); he will think nothing of it.
And the prodigal son, this grand idea, will feel raw, untouched and burning, all at once. The sun rises, somewhere, inside his closed fist.
They expect nothing from him and they expect everything from him.
How can you expect anything from this boy? Fatherless, quiet – tragic is what ladies say behind gloved hands. But he is an heir, and so there are expectations, and then expectations beyond expectations. Mama is quite particular about how he holds his teacup. And George – spoiled, pampered, and yet treated as though he is something absent – keeps his tiny legs very still on the chair, is careful to mimic everything his mother is.
They have tea for an hour every day. Sometimes, Mama is kind; she tells him stories, nods proudly when he replies. Other times, they drink in silence. She has tutor comes too early. She looks to the side as if looking at him hurts him, says, “Darling, your Mama is terribly tired. I think that’s enough for today.”
George, who is not a terribly vain child, but also not humble because he will never have a need to be, stands on his toes and peers into the mirror for long moments after those sorts of meetings. There are parts of oneself that exist outside the body. George does not think of that. The boy presses his palms against his forehead and checks for the horns Cousin Sybbie always tells him he’s growing.
When he is still a boy, still allowed to be there, George likes it downstairs more than up.
He is fond of perching at the very top of the stairs, or just behind the corners, where the other servants can’t see him. Fond, too, of jumping from those shadowed hideaways, trying to shock a rushing maid. At the very least, he likes the way their eyes go wide, the scramble to bow and curtsey and make their bodies bend into shapes he doesn’t quite understand. (Status sits on him too naturally, too much of his mother’s grace in the turn of his head.) He finds it all terribly funny.
“You’ll give me a heart attack one day, Master George,” Carson thunders, but only because Carson always thunders, not because he’s cross. Carson’s never cross with him. Carson is, George thinks, roughly estimating, about a thousand times taller than he is (Sybbie confirms his maths “sound about right”), but Carson leans down always so that George can see the lines in the old butler’s face, the grey-turned-white snow hair. He’s allowed to hold Carson’s pocket watch (warm) in his hands (cold, from the downstairs draft). Carson teaches him how to read it. George stands in Carson’s shadow and it’s the best hiding place of all. When he’s upstairs, Carson is a shadow himself, always gone in a blink, but downstairs, Carson’s something of a mountain. He feels permanent and steady and adjusts the symmetry in George’s suit, lets him swing his legs in the chair in his pantry, lets him run, even.
Once or twice, Carson has picked him up and George felt like he was flying. Both times, these escapades were interrupted by the sound of small metal bells, a heavy heel, and the stern cluck of Mrs. Hughes’ tongue, which sounds like a key opening a lock.
“Don’t strain yourself now, Mr. Carson,” she had said when she passed. She had smiled, with some conjured warmth, at George. (She’s fond of his youth, sympathetic to his tragedies, a happy stranger to everything else. Of all the servants, it is Mrs. Hughes’ who’s most likely to shoo him back up the steps, “It’s very nice of you to visit, Master George, but you won’t get your dinner ‘less you let us get on.”) George thinks Mrs. Hughes is awfully like the knights in the books the governess reads to him, though the knights are all men and Mrs. Hughes is not. But she marches like one, sword unsheathed, keys in her hand. She had shot cutting glances at Carson, and George had understood why the butler had submitted to a simple look, understood how a dragon had been slain.
Carson is not a man who winks, but each gesture to George is one. So the boy stands there, staring up at the butler, staring down at the time ticking away in his hands, pressed against the striped pant-leg, against the heavy smell of pomade and the house (no one smells like the big house like Carson does). Carson takes the watch from him with a gentleness George never expects from those giant hands. Like magic, there’s a sixpence there instead. Carson says nothing of it, only smiles and ushers him, kindly, up the steps.
Aunt Edith was in the habit of not referring to him by name. This wasn’t meant as a cruelty to her nephew, George comes to understand later, but perhaps a cruelty to herself. Aunt Edith loves Sybbie because she had loved the absent Aunt Sybil and because she’s fond of Uncle Tom. She loves him because she had been fond of Matthew Crawley and because he, George, is touched by that same sort of tragedy: something missing before one even begins, always. Aunt Edith, perhaps mostly by her own designation, belongs to this group as well.
“Come here,” his aunt says. (She was not in the habit of using terms of endearment either.)
His aunt’s hand trembles slightly, but she touches the ghost-gold of his hair (how similar it is to hers), runs her fingers against his cheek, the bone of his jaw. Aunt Edith’s hands are soft and give too generously to tenderness; this being on account of how few opportunities she has to give.
Then the hand is withdrawn sharply. They stand, fractured, in the honey light, before his aunt turns away, revealing all the jagged angles of her face, all the sunken shadow bones.
“Your mother must be missing you terribly.”
It’s a sign, a cue. It’s her telling him to leave.
(He does.)
George thinks of leaping on his father’s grave. He tells Carson this, legs swinging on the pantry chair. Carson’s become only half-attentive (as George had lapsed into a temperamental silence, the butler had opened one of his books, and now all his looks and affirmations are drowsy with the reflections of ink), but something about the suggestion cause his back to stiffen again, his eyes to clear.
“Why-ever would you think of doing that, Master George?” Carson intones, and George knows enough of Carson to know the butler is picking his words carefully and that maybe he ought to as well. (Carson is studying him now, thinking maybe he’s angry, maybe bitter, thinking what to say to a child like that.)
“Well, maybe he’s just asleep,” George says. “Maybe I just need to wake him up.”
Carson tells him his father’s not sleeping like the rest of them sleep, that he can’t be woken up, not like that, but that he’s here too, in other ways. The butler points to his heart, points to the walls.
“Do you know why I love Downton so much, Master George?” Carson says and his voice is shockingly quiet, humming with so much secrecy that George sits upright and leans in close as he can. “History. It’s all in these walls. Your history is here and will always be here – and that will never leave you.”
When the servants eat their dinner that night, George kneels at the top of their steps, his ear pressed against the wall, trying to catch his father’s voice. From his angle, he can just see Carson and the flash of his knife. Mrs. Hughes’ is at his side, and she rests with a palm turned up – opened. George mimics the housekeeper’s hands, wonders if it means anything. Barrow’s there too, a smile always twisting beneath his frown. George doesn’t often see his face because Barrow always stands above him, never tilts his chin.
And then Sybbie is behind him, kicking at his back, asking him what he’s up to, that Aunt Mary – Mama – is looking for him. George presses his ear harder against the wall, pushes the open palm against the wood. Feels something like warmth in his hands, hears something soft and quiet in his ear.
He keeps his hand open, collects the feeling, picks it from every wall in the house, until he can’t hold it anymore.
The Countess of Grantham looks very much like his mother, but older, and with brighter eyes, and she speaks funny too. His grandmother is attached to his grandfather (his only grandfather, he has no father and one grandfather and maybe he was always going to be lopsided, right from the start) by the arm, and George walks on the Earl’s other side. George wonders if this is what Mama did with his father ever, the tweed suits and skirts, the feathered hats, heads slanted against a gust of cold wind.
His grandfather is fond of turning dramatically, of sweeping his free arm out, saying, “This is ours, George, our duty. This is what I’ll give to you and what you’ll give to another, one day.” In these fits, Cora Crawley is silent, smiles without laughing. Sometimes, his grandmother pats his garndfather’s arm, says, “I’d be fine with something a touch smaller, what do you think?”
His grandfather leaves them out there, because there is a call or a meeting or something like that, and his shadow, a golden dog (whom George is fond of, because their hairs match and she has a wet nose and a fondness for bringing balls back when he tosses them; George is fond of anything that comes back) traces the lord's footprints, and then it’s just him and his grandmother standing out on that endless lawn.
“When you love something enough, I suppose you have to show it,” she says in her strange familiar voice. Lady Grantham does not often say things like that, not to him, anyway, but she’s smiling (his grandmother has a pocketbook of different smiles) and George thinks this is an apology for something. (Later, on his thousandth walk around the grounds, his grandfather holding a cane, his grandfather casting two golden shadows, George will come home and Lady Grantham will stand in the doorway and smile that same smile – and George will understand.)
She stays with George when he rushes back out, picks flowers from the garden, assures the gardener that of course it’s fine, waves her hand. She says the purple ones will look nice with the yellow streaming from his hands. She stays by his side when he holds out his lopsided bouquet to Mama, who smiles (rarer than her mother’s, sharper too, raw) and passes them to Carson, who has them put in a china vase by her bedside.
But when George places a lone purple flower, hidden and slightly bent from his pocket, in his grandmother’s hands, she laughs. And it’s not mocking or because he’s done something funny. She laughs because she’s happy. Just because she’s happy.
George doesn’t hear that sound nearly enough.
He’s eleven when his other grandmother – Isobel, who is fond of touching his hair, holding him to make sure he’s real, whose whole face breaks into the way a song ought to look when she sees him coming up through the window – brings him around the back.
“What is it?”
“A bicycle. It was your father’s.”
He’s not quite big enough yet, can’t quite touch the ground, but he runs his hands along the gears, makes the pedals spin.
“Did he like it?”
“Like it? For the longest time, it was like he was attached to it!” (His grandmother is like that, full of exclamations, and George likes that about her, likes it terribly.)
His grandmother touches the tip of his nose and smiles, rubs her fingers because there was grease on the bike and then it was on his hands and then it was everywhere. And now it’s on both of them, but Isobel Crawley never minded a bit of dirt, and it smells like filth and earth, feels like a ghost running just beneath the skin. She kneels in the grass and George stands on his tiptoes and they can both feel it, the weight of the memory, the weight of two feet on two old pedals, the weight of two wheels spinning through history. And they both feel it, a father somewhere, riding home.
He grows older, looks more like his mother because they remember less of his father. Matthew Crawley’s face is frozen in time, unchanging, and so all of George’s differences, all of his teenage lank or the way his chin looks sharp, here, the angle of the nose there, are unfamiliar. Must belong to his mother, whose face can still be examined (sometimes, even, distant lords and half befriended ladies will tell him he looks like his mother’s new husband – who is not that new at all, but always new because there will always be a precursor, a footnote, something older, something that existed before – and George smiles anyway, because none of it really matters).
They go walking, still. The Crawleys – even his mother, especially his mother (her name changed, but her spirit never did) – are a family in a fixed motion, trapped patrolling the edges of familiarity and everything they can’t let go. They go walking, mother and son, and there’s a thread between them, some rose-gold embroidery, some ghost they both can’t shake – wouldn’t, even if they could.
(There are ones he would, though. George has a bad arm, anyway, where the bullet kissed his blood, has his own ghosts that make nightly visits, rust his skin and grind at his bones. He had come home and Sybbie had punched his good arm, cried when she said, “I told you not to do anything stupid, stupid!” and Mama had cried too, had held his face in her hands and then her arms had held his neck and she had collapsed against him, and the world had felt solid again, for the first time in so long, in so very long. He looks different now, he supposes, ravaged by something outside Downton’s halls. Or maybe, he looks more familiar. George has a photograph of his father, in uniform, resting against a mirror. He used to look at it.)
(Anyway, none of it matters. Nothing matters like it used to.)
They walk until they reach the cemetery, and George is older now, and older still for standing there. They walk past old Carson’s grave, which felt too small, feels too small now. How can a mountain be covered under that little dirt? How did they put him into that small of a box? Some questions can’t be answered and so the spaces are filled with roses. They pass Mrs. Hughes’ grave, where she lies as she stood, at Carson’s side. These are the things that comfort the soul, George figures.
He wonders where his mother will be buried, where she wants to be.
Pause, again, by Grandfather’s. Pause by Great-Granny’s. They could have arms full of roses and, hands like stems, fingers like thorns, and still there wouldn’t be enough.
And the world heaves itself still when Mama walks ahead, kneels down by Matthew Crawley’s bones, so many nights spent in this earth.
George lingers behind. He’s a proper man now, but still, but still, he turns his head and gives them space, turns his head in the way he did when Mama whispered to her husband, when they kissed on the lips and he was young and the world was shy. Some things are meant to be private: love and the burial of it, and the intimacy of a widow and her grave. George opens Carson’s pocket watch (warm), watches a minute slip through his palms.
Mama is standing upright now, and he comes, a hand briefly on her shoulder.
“Wake up, Mother,” he says, after another minute, when she doesn’t move. His voice is soft; his touch is lighter.
“I’m awake, darling,” she says, and she takes his hand, and he holds it firm. “I’m awake.”
Maybe life is just one open grave. Age makes him morbid, but he can still see a boy, checking for horns, in his reflection. He’s quiet still. There are shouts and children and grandchild in Downton, there always are, and he is still quiet.
He goes walking now, mostly on his own. One arm swinging, one held still by life and all the forces too big for a lone body.
George Crawley goes walking. He fakes a jump over old Carson’s grave, stands straighter when he passes the late Mrs. Hughes. There are flowers in his hands and he leaves the purple ones at the Countess of Grantham’s, divvies the roses between the other grandmother and the first dowager he knew; the rest are for his mother.
He stands at Mary Crawley’s grave, but rarely finds the words to say. Knocks, then, on her headstone twice. “Wake up,” George says, but he never says it right. His voice always cracks and so the earth is always still.
He’s almost done, now, knows the routine as intimately as breathing. George wills his legs to move, one more grave over. He stands in the shadow of Matthew Crawley’s grave and tries to smile, wonders which one comes out. He doesn’t have any more flowers, never had arms for all of them, but his hands are warm and there’s a history in the creases, warmth from the palms. There’s a feeling like wallpaper and some grease that never washed out, the smell of a ghost-woman’s perfume and the taste of tea.
George doesn’t know what to say to his father, even now, especially now, either. His father, who was both always there and not there. Doesn’t know a thing.
But he presses those hands into the earth, just above where the heart ought to be – and he thinks, for once, he understands.
History never leaves the blood.