Chapter Ten London #2
What followed was not a conversation in the sense of a social exchange conducted according to the available forms. It was a conversation in the other sense, the rarer one, where two people's thinking aligned on a subject neither of them had brought with the intention of discussing and then followed it wherever it went with the willingness of people who had forgotten, temporarily, to monitor the direction.
He told her about Hutton's argument for the age of the earth, which was vast and geological and made human concerns seem appropriately scaled.
She found herself arguing, not against the argument itself but against the comfort of the conclusion, which she thought he was drawing too neatly.
He responded to her argument not with defence but with genuine engagement, the kind where you could feel the other person actually revising as they listened.
They moved from Hutton to the broader question of what counted as evidence for things you could not observe directly, which she found more interesting than the geology itself, and he said something about the enclosure of common land in relation to this that was, she thought, completely unexpected from a man of his position and exactly right.
He said that the enclosure acts were themselves a kind of argument about evidence, which was that the people with the power to draw the conclusions also had the power to define what counted as a fact, and that this was worth considering when assessing any large-scale claim about improvement.
She was quiet for a moment.
"You are arguing," she said, "against the interests of your own class."
"I am arguing for the accurate assessment of evidence," he said. "The class interest is incidental."
"Is it."
"I believe it ought to be."
She looked at him. "There is a considerable distance," she said, "between what ought to be and what is."
"Yes," he said. "I am aware of that."
There was a quality in his voice when he said this that she noted and did not press, because there was something in it that she did not have the right frame for yet and pressing things before you had the right frame was how you distorted them.
They talked for forty minutes.
She knew it was forty minutes because the church bell somewhere nearby struck the quarter hour twice while they were speaking, and she counted both strikes with the part of her mind that was tracking time for the purposes of her aunt's household and the luncheon that was expected at one o'clock.
When the second strike came she said, with the tone of a person who has returned from somewhere and is finding the world's practical demands somewhat importunate: "I must go. My aunt will be expecting me."
"Of course," he said.
There was a pause.
He was holding Hutton. She had been holding it, then he had taken it to find a particular passage, then she had taken it back, and now it had somehow returned to him, and this small domestic comedy of a shared object felt, in the context of the last forty minutes, like a more intimate transaction than it had any right to be.
"I hope you enjoy your father's book," he said.
"I hope Pemberley's valleys prove satisfying on further investigation," she said.
He looked at her for a moment. The corner of his expression did the thing again that she had thought was amusement and was now less certain was only that.
She left.
She walked back to Gracechurch Street in the February cold with her father's book under her arm and the specific sensation of someone who has been somewhere and is finding it difficult to be entirely returned. The city went on around her with its usual London indifference to individual experience.
She was angry with herself. She was conscious of being angry with herself and she applied the anger honestly: she had spent forty minutes in a bookshop with Fitzwilliam Darcy talking about the geological age of the earth and the enclosure of common land, and she had laughed three times, and she had found him more genuinely interesting than she had found anything since the last time she had found him genuinely interesting, which had been in the Netherfield library, and the pattern of this was something she did not want to examine because the pattern said something she was not ready to hear.
She thought: it does not change what he said.
She thought: a man can be interesting and also capable of the thing he said.
She thought: forty minutes in a bookshop is not evidence of character.
These were all true things. She held them carefully all the way to Gracechurch Street and into the house and she said something light and accurate to her aunt about the book and about the walk, and she went upstairs and stood at the window of her room for a moment before washing her hands for luncheon.
She thought about the enclosure of common land.
She thought about the quality of a man who said what he thought it ought to be and acknowledged the gap between that and what it was.
She thought about nothing, for one moment. Just the February light on the London rooftops.
Then she went downstairs.
He had purchased the book. She did not know this.
He stood in the shop after she left and looked at the volume in his hands for a moment and then paid for it with the decisive quality of a man who has made a decision before he was aware he was making one, and took it home to Grosvenor Street and sat in his library with it in the early afternoon light.
He did not read it.
He held it for a while. He thought about forty minutes and about what the specific quality of those forty minutes had been, which was that he had been entirely present in them in a way he was not entirely present in most of his life, and that the person responsible for this was Elizabeth Bennet, and that this was not new information, but that the particular form it had taken this afternoon in a bookshop near the Strand had the quality of something settling into its permanent shape.
He was not going to be able to reason his way out of this.
He had tried reasoning for six months and the result was a library in Grosvenor Street and a book about geological time and the specific, precise memory of a woman laughing in the natural philosophy section when she had not intended to.
He set the book down.
He picked it up again.
He read it for the rest of the afternoon.