Chapter Ten London
London in February had the quality of a city that had been keeping itself going through the winter by the application of coal fires and determination and was beginning, around its edges, to suspect that spring might eventually cooperate.
Elizabeth had been here for four days and had found each of them better than the last, which was the reliable arithmetic of the Gardiners' company.
Her uncle had taken her to a lecture on Tuesday that she was still thinking about on Thursday.
Her aunt had walked with her through three different neighbourhoods on Wednesday with the attentive pleasure of a woman who found the city genuinely interesting and wanted to share the interest rather than the performance of it.
The Gardiner children had been underfoot in the best possible way, small and demanding and entirely unconcerned with anything that occupied the adult mind, and Elizabeth had found this, after several months of Longbourn and its particular species of domestic weight, something very close to restorative.
She was, she had told her aunt over breakfast that morning, very glad to be here.
Her aunt had looked at her over the rim of her cup with the expression of a woman who heard more than the sentence. "You have needed to be somewhere else," she said.
"Longbourn is perfectly comfortable."
"Longbourn is home," her aunt said, which was not the same thing and they both knew it. "You have been there all winter and you are one of those people who needs a different view occasionally to see the original one clearly."
Elizabeth had said something about the view from Gracechurch Street being an excellent corrective and changed the subject, because her aunt's precision was one of the qualities she most valued in her and one of the qualities she found it most necessary to redirect when the precision was pointing at something she was not ready to examine.
She went out at eleven to find the book her father had requested.
He had written the title and author in his particular hand on a slip of paper that she had tucked into her glove, and she walked from Gracechurch Street toward the bookseller in the direction of the Strand that her uncle had recommended, in the specific pleasured way of a person who likes walking in cities and finds the density of life on a London pavement genuinely interesting.
The cold was the clean kind. The street noise had the quality that street noise had when you were in good spirits, which was to say it seemed like company rather than intrusion.
She found the shop without difficulty.
It was a proper bookseller, the kind that had been in the same location long enough to have organised itself according to principles that had grown around the particular shape of its shelves rather than any systematic plan.
She liked this kind. The kind with a system was useful for finding what you already knew you wanted, but the kind that had organised itself by internal logic rather than external order was better for finding what you did not know you were looking for.
She asked the assistant for her father's book.
He disappeared into the back regions of the shop with the unhurried confidence of a man who knew where everything was and found the question of other people's urgency largely irrelevant.
She waited, and she looked at the shelves, and she moved, because she was constitutionally unable to stand still in a room full of books, toward the section near the rear of the shop that she could see from the descriptions on the spines was organised around natural philosophy and related matters.
She was reading the spine of a volume on the formation of river valleys, which was not something she had ever thought about before and was becoming interesting very quickly, when she heard the door.
She did not look up. The shop was a public space and people came into it and this was not, in itself, information.
Then the assistant came back from the rear regions with her father's book and said, at the normal volume of a shop assistant completing a transaction: "Mr. Darcy, sir, the volume you ordered last month has just come in."
Elizabeth became very still.
Not the stillness of shock. The stillness of a person who has received information and needs two seconds to determine what to do with it.
She had two seconds. She used the first to confirm that she was in the natural philosophy section near the rear of the shop and therefore not immediately visible from the door. She used the second to make a decision.
The decision was that she would get her father's book from the assistant, pay for it, and leave. This was the obvious and reasonable approach.
She stepped out from the natural philosophy section to reach the counter.
He was standing at the front of the shop, three feet from the door, reading something the assistant had handed him.
He was not in the coat she associated with Hertfordshire, which was country clothing.
He was in London clothing, which was somehow more formal and, she noted with the lateral attention she could not seem to stop applying to him, very good. He looked up from the page.
Their eyes met.
Four seconds.
She thought, with the involuntary precision that her mind applied to things she was not controlling: this is the second time I have counted his seconds.
"Miss Bennet," he said.
His voice had the quality it always had when he was not performing, which she had learned at Netherfield to distinguish from the version that was performing: it was direct and unhurried and did not go looking for the appropriate register before committing to a sentence.
"Mr. Darcy," she said. "I was not aware you were in town."
"I came up for business last week." He was looking at her with the focused attention that she had not been able to fully classify for three months and had not, she was finding, made progress on in the interval. "Are you staying with family?"
"The Gardiners, in Gracechurch Street. My uncle is in trade," she said, in the specific tone she used when she said things that some people found relevant and she found them finding it relevant. She said it to see what he did with it.
He did nothing with it. His expression did not shift by the degree of a single candlepower.
"I hope the visit has been agreeable," he said.
"Very much so." She had the book now, and the moment had the structure of a conclusion: she had what she came for, they had exchanged the minimum required by courtesy, the door was three feet behind him. "I will not keep you."
She did not know, afterward, which of them moved differently in that moment.
She only knew that neither of them moved toward the door, and that after a pause that lasted approximately two seconds too long to be purely conversational interval, he looked at the shelf behind her and said: "Are you interested in natural philosophy? "
She looked at the book in her hands, which was the one on river valleys that she had been reading when he arrived.
She had picked it up without intending to. She was now holding it as though she had come for it specifically.
"I have just become interested," she said, "in the formation of river valleys."
Something happened on his face. She thought it was amusement, or something close to amusement, the controlled version that appeared at the corners of his expression rather than in the centre of it.
"That is a reasonable place to start," he said. "Although Hutton's work on the subject would serve you better than Playfair's summary of it."
"You have read both?"
"Pemberley has a significant number of valleys," he said. "The question of how they were formed seemed, at some point, worth investigating."
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"That," she said, "is either the most practical approach to natural philosophy I have encountered, or an extraordinarily good reason to investigate it."
"I had always assumed they were the same thing."
She laughed.
It was not performed. It was not the social laugh she deployed in rooms when something was adequately amusing and laughter was the appropriate response.
It was the real one, the one that surprised her by arriving, and she was aware of it as real in the way that you were aware of the difference between a room with fire in it and a room without.
"Hutton is on the shelf behind you," she said, because looking at the shelf gave her somewhere to look that was not directly at him.
"I know," he said. "I have read it twice."
"Then why did you recommend it?"
"Because you had not," he said. "And because the first time I read it I found it satisfying in the way that true things are satisfying, and I thought you might find that particular quality of satisfaction agreeable."
She turned back from the shelf and looked at him properly.
He was not performing this. This was the quality she had been trying to classify for three months: the absolute absence of performance in a man who had every social reason to be performing constantly and who appeared to find it not worth the effort.
He had said what he meant. He thought she would like the book. He had said so.
"That is," she said carefully, "an unusually direct recommendation."
"I find indirection in book recommendations a particular waste of everyone's time."
"Only book recommendations?"
He considered this with the gravity he brought to questions that deserved consideration. "Primarily book recommendations. Other areas have their uses for indirection. Books are too important."
She put the river valley book down on the shelf and picked up Hutton.
"Tell me," she said, "about the satisfying quality."
He told her.