The Last Good Day
VIII
She came back from her early walk to find the house already in full voice — Lydia in the hallway demanding to know whether anyone had seen her blue ribbon, Kitty on the stairs insisting she had not taken it, Mrs Bennet calling down for Hill to send up her tray.
Mary was at the pianoforte. Jane was in the kitchen garden. Her father’s study door was closed.
Elizabeth hung up her bonnet, went to the kitchen to find some breakfast, and was, for the first time since returning from Kent, entirely at home.
By ten o’clock, the ribbon had been found — it had been Kitty’s all along, only she had forgotten — and Lydia had moved on to the more engrossing subject of Brighton.
The regiment was to summer there. Harriet Forster had written; Mrs Bennet had read the letter aloud at breakfast; Lydia had vibrated with a species of excitement that made even the chairs seem exhausted.
“If we were only to go,” Lydia said, for perhaps the fourth time since breakfast, addressing the room at large from her favourite position draped across the settee. “Just think of it — the sea, and the officers, and the dances — I am sure I should come back quite transformed.”
“Into what remains unclear,” Elizabeth said, not looking up from her book.
“Into a married woman, perhaps,” Lydia said, entirely unabashed.
“On the strength of one summer in Brighton?”
“People have managed on less.”
“People have also returned from Brighton considerably worse off than they left it, which I suspect is the more likely outcome.”
Lydia threw a cushion at her. Elizabeth caught it without looking up.
Mrs Bennet, who had been following this exchange with the expression reserved for a shuttlecock match whose rules were not clear to her, declared Brighton sounded very well.
Sea air was restorative. She saw no reason the girls could not go, if a suitable arrangement could be made — it was very hard that her daughters should be confined to Hertfordshire all summer when there was nothing in Hertfordshire to speak of.
“Someone else may take Netherfield,” Kitty offered.
“Netherfield,” Mrs Bennet said, “is empty. And has been empty. And will likely continue to be empty, for I have given up expecting anything from that quarter.”
“I understand there is some talk of a family from Northamptonshire taking it,” Mary said, from behind her book. “Mrs Long mentioned it to Hill.”
“Mrs Long,” said Mrs Bennet, “has two nieces and is hoping whoever takes it has sons. I would not depend on her intelligence.”
“I would not depend on Mrs Long’s intelligence in any event,” Elizabeth said, turning a page, “but that is a separate matter.”
Her father appeared in the doorway of the drawing room with the look he wore when the noise had reached a volume he was choosing to address rather than endure.
He surveyed the scene — Lydia on the settee, Kitty in the window seat, Mrs Bennet on her favourite chair with her embroidery untouched beside her, Mary reading, Jane and Elizabeth sharing the sofa — with the expression long since reserved for peace with his domestic situation that he still found faintly bewildering.
“Lizzy,” he said. “Come and see this.”
It was a letter from a bookseller in London — a Morocco leather edition of Johnson’s Rasselas with gilt edging, which he had been trying to locate for the better part of a year, now finally available, on which he had wanted her opinion as to whether it was worth the price.
She gave it, he argued for the pleasure of arguing, she revised her opinion to agree with his.
He always knew when she was handling him.
“You always see through me,” she said.
“Only because you are transparent when you are being kind.” He set the letter down. “How are you, Lizzy? In earnest.”
He was watching her with the attention he deployed rarely — not the sideways amusement that was his usual manner, but something more direct.
“I am very well. In earnest.”
“The summer will do you good. Your uncle’s scheme of going north sounds rather merry. The lakes, was it not?”
“It was. Though I had a letter from my aunt this morning that the plan has fallen through. Uncle Gardiner finds he cannot get away after all.”
Her father eyed her over his spectacles. “Did she say why?”
“Only that his business requires him in town this summer. She was very cheerful about it.”
“Mm. Your uncle is not a man who is cheerful about disappointment unless he has decided to be cheerful about it for someone else’s benefit.”
“You think his affairs are not well?”
“I think a man who cancels a journey to the Lake Country and sounds perfectly sanguine about it is either genuinely sanguine, which your uncle is capable of, or is declining to worry his wife and niece with something he has not yet resolved.” He set the pen down.
“I do not know which. I mention it only so that you are not entirely surprised if it turns out to be the latter.”
“I am sure it is nothing,” she said.
“You are very likely right.” He picked up the bookseller’s letter again, which closed the subject. “Now. This edition. I am minded to think the price entirely reasonable, but I suspect you are going to tell me otherwise.”
“I am going to tell you it is extravagant,” Elizabeth said, “and you are going to buy it anyway, and I am going to pretend to be surprised.”
“Just so,” he said. “Which is why I asked you. So.” He set the bookseller’s letter aside. “The lakes are gone. What will you do with yourself this summer?”
“I shall manage,” Elizabeth said. “There are the assemblies, if one is feeling ambitious enough. Lydia claims she will be in Brighton, which will make the house considerably quieter, but I think it would be a very bad thing for her. Netherfield is empty, as my mother has mentioned seventeen times this week, so there is no hope from that quarter. I may read every book in your library and become very learned and disagreeable.”
“You are already disagreeable. The learning would only give it a veneer of respectability.” He tilted his head.
“And no eligible gentleman will ride through Meryton and catch your eye? They have a way of doing that. Appearing out of nowhere, letting properties in the neighbourhood, overturning everything.”
“I think I have had quite enough of eligible gentlemen for some time.”
“Well, Hertfordshire in summer is not so very bad. The evenings are long. The neighbours are bearable in small doses. And I shall be here, which I flatter myself counts for something.”
“It counts for a great deal.”
“Good. Now, I have decided to order two copies.”
Elizabeth looked up. “Two?”
“A plain calfskin one to hide in my desk. The gilt one for you, for whichever room you happen to leave it in, which, judging by past experience, will be at least three rooms away from where it started.” He dipped his pen.
“Dawkins will think me extravagant. I find I do not mind. The letter shall go with the afternoon post.”
She stood and kissed the top of his head — she almost never did, and it surprised them both. Then she went back to the drawing room.
Lydia was still talking about Brighton.
“Colonel Forster has quite decided,” she announced, helping herself to more potatoes. “Harriet says the whole regiment goes in June. And she has asked if I might come to stay with them for some weeks as a companion. She was very pressing about it in her letter.”
“You are fifteen,” Mary said.
“I am nearly sixteen, which is entirely different.”
“In what respect?”
“In every respect.”
“Mrs Forster is very young herself,” Jane said gently. “She might find it lonely without some company of her own age.”
“Exactly,” said Lydia, with the satisfaction proper to one whose argument has been made for her. “She needs me.”
“That is not precisely what I—” Jane began.
“Well, I do not see the harm in it,” Mrs Bennet said, “if Colonel Forster is responsible for the arrangements. Lydia has been very good lately.”
“Has she?” Elizabeth asked.
“Comparatively,” Mrs Bennet allowed.
“Compared to what?” Elizabeth asked.
“Compared to what she might have been!” Mrs Bennet said, with the perfect certainty proper to a woman arguing from an entirely imaginary baseline.
Elizabeth turned to her father. “Papa…”
He was watching all of it with his cup halfway to his mouth, his eyes creased at the corners. He caught her eye. The look between them said everything — the same thing it had always said, the private treaty of two people who found the world funny in the same way and were glad of the company.
“I think,” he said, “that the only genuine argument against Lydia going to Brighton is that she will come back and tell us all about it for the remainder of the year, and we will none of us get any peace.”
“If I come back and don’t tell you anything, you will only complain that I am secretive,” Lydia said.
“That is true,” Elizabeth said. “You cannot win, Lydia. Papa has constructed a position from which there is no escape.”
“Your sister,” Mr Bennet said, with the satisfaction proper to the delivery of a line he was pleased with, “has been constructing inescapable positions since she was approximately—”
He stopped.
His fork was halfway to his plate. A piece of lamb on the tines.
The smile had not quite gone from his face.
But it was going — she saw it go — the amusement leaving around the eyes first, replaced by something that was not pain exactly but a kind of absence, an attention gone somewhere else.
He reached for the cup. His hand, which had been steady all her life, was not steady now. He got the cup to his mouth. He drank.
He did not swallow.
Elizabeth had been watching his throat when the tea came back up — not coughed, not spat, come back, as though the throat had refused it. The cup went sideways in his hand. Tea went across the cloth, across his plate, across his lap.
He was making a sound she had never heard. Not coughing. Something below coughing, below breathing — the sound a throat made when it was trying to get air past something that would not move, and failing.
She was out of her chair without having decided to move. Her hand was on his shoulder. “Papa!”
Jane had got round to the other side of him. Her mother was making a sound too, high and thin and useless. Kitty had knocked her chair back and stood pressed against the wall. Mary had Lydia by the arm.
“Papa, lean forward — Papa!”
She struck him between the shoulder blades.
Once. Twice. Harder. His back under her hand had gone rigid in a way bodies were not meant to be.
His hand had gone to his throat and stayed there, clutching, as though he could pull whatever it was out with his fingers.
His face had gone a colour that was wrong — that was not any colour a face ought to be — and she hit him again, and again, and his eyes were on her face, and they were finding her, and they were asking her something, and she did not know what he was asking, and she did not know how to answer and she hit him again.
“Papa, no! Papa!”
Something in his chest gave — not released, gave, the way a rope gave before it broke — and for an instant she had thought it had worked, had thought the thing had moved, had thought he would draw breath, and she had put both hands on his shoulders and held him and waited for the breath.
It did not come.
His eyes were still finding her face. And then, without any change she could have pointed to — no closing, no darkening, nothing she would have been able to describe afterward if anyone had asked her — they were not finding her face any longer.
They were open, and they were turned towards her, and they were not seeing her.
His hand dropped from his throat.
Mrs Bennet’s cries brought the servants. Jane sent for the apothecary. Mary took Kitty and Lydia from the room. Elizabeth stayed.
She stayed when Hill came in, when the apothecary came, when the apothecary’s face did the thing faces do when there is nothing more to be done.
She stayed when the room went quiet — not peaceful, not restful, just emptied of a sound she had been hearing her whole life and could not now locate anywhere.
She was still in the chair beside him when Jane came back and put a hand on her shoulder and said her name very gently.
She did not move for a long time.