Chapter Twenty-Four The Visit
Bingley came first.
He came the day before Darcy, which was either a coincidence or an arrangement, and Elizabeth suspected it was an arrangement made by the specific intelligence of a man who understood his friend well enough to know that approaching Longbourn with Bingley preceding him by twenty-four hours would give the household time to adjust to the general fact of the Netherfield party's return before it was required to adjust to the specific fact of Darcy.
She could not have said whether this was calculation or consideration. She was trying, with the disciplined attention she had been applying to herself since June, to stop treating those as categories that excluded each other.
Bingley arrived at eleven in the morning on a Thursday with the quality he always had, which was the quality of a man whose arrival made rooms feel warmer.
He asked after Mrs. Bennet with the warmth of someone who genuinely wished Mrs. Bennet well.
He asked after Mr. Bennet with the respect of someone who understood that Mr. Bennet was worth respecting in the particular ways that mattered.
He asked after Elizabeth and Kitty and Mary in sequence, and he said something about Lydia's marriage that was exactly right in its brevity and its warmth and its avoidance of any of the various wrong notes available.
Then he asked after Jane.
He asked after Jane with the quality of a man who had been asking this question inside his own head for several months and was finally being given the occasion to ask it aloud, and Jane came in from the garden where she had, Elizabeth strongly suspected, been for the last twenty minutes because she had heard the carriage and needed a moment before she came in, and Bingley stood up when she entered.
Elizabeth watched the room.
She watched Bingley and Jane do the thing that two people did when they had been apart from each other for a period during which each of them had been thinking about the other in the specific way that made the reunion significant: they looked at each other and the room rearranged itself around the looking.
She thought: they have both been waiting.
She thought: and the waiting has been the same on both sides, which is what Darcy could not see from the outside and what the letter had been the beginning of his understanding.
She thought: this is what his interference cost them.
She thought, immediately after: and he knows it. He has known it since the letter. And he came back to the neighbourhood anyway, because what you have done wrong is not a reason to stay away from the people it cost.
She was watching Bingley and Jane with a warmth so acute it was almost painful when Darcy came in.
He came in behind Bingley, which was where he always positioned himself in entrances, and the room received him the way the room always received him: with the slight shift in atmosphere that his presence always produced, a raising of social temperature that was not quite the same as Bingley's warmth but was its own variety of significant.
He looked at Elizabeth.
She had been looking at Bingley and Jane, and she turned from that to look at Darcy, and for a moment the two threads of the room were entirely visible to her: the one that was resolving itself with the ease of two people who had simply needed the occasion, and the one that was still in progress, that required more than occasion, that required the specific thing she had been carrying since she burned the letter at midnight and had not yet said.
"Mr. Darcy," she said.
"Miss Bennet," he said.
They sat.
The room had several people in it and conducted itself accordingly, with the conversations that rooms conducted when they contained people who were glad to be together and had a certain amount of catching up to do after several months of altered circumstances.
Mrs. Bennet talked. Bingley talked. Mary said something about a pamphlet she had read.
Kitty asked Bingley about a ball he had apparently mentioned to Denny.
Darcy and Elizabeth sat near each other and talked.
Not exclusively to each other. Through the medium of the room's general activity, in the private way that people talked in public when they had a great deal to say and were not yet in the circumstances that allowed it.
It was the most comfortable version of the specific discomfort that had been the texture of every conversation they had had for six months, which was to say that it was not comfortable at all, but it had a different quality from the old discomfort.
The old discomfort was the discomfort of two people who were managing the distance between them.
This was the discomfort of two people who were in the process of closing it and had not yet completed the closing.
He asked about her walk this morning. She had been out early, before the visit.
"I walked the lane," she said. "The one behind the south field. I find I go there when I have things to think through."
"And have you thought them through?"
She looked at him.
"Some of them," she said.
He was quiet for a moment, the thinking quiet rather than the social quiet.
"There are matters I should attend to at Longbourn," he said, in the voice that was chosen rather than casual, "with your father's solicitor. The settlement arrangements. Some final details."
She was very still.
"I handled the final details personally," he said. "Last week. It seemed important that it be done correctly."
He was not looking at her. He was looking at the general middle distance of the Longbourn drawing room, at the point between herself and the fireplace, with the quality of a man who has said something true and is not looking at the person he said it to because looking would turn the saying into something else, into a declaration or a request, and he is not ready to do that yet, not here, not with the room full of people.
She understood this.
She understood it in the way she understood him, which had been built over six months of the wrong understanding and was still being corrected in her, still becoming the right one, and had this specific quality: that she no longer required him to be legible by her old measure.
She was learning his measure from the inside.
"I know," she said.
He looked at her then.
She met his eyes.
She thought: I know who did it and why and what it cost and what it was not done for, and I know that you are sitting here in my mother's drawing room telling me a small piece of it because you need me to know it from you and not only from the Gardiners' letter, and I know that this is the most significant thing you have said to me today and possibly in several months.
She said none of this.
She looked at him and he looked at her and the room went on around them with its warm, ordinary noise, and they held this between them for a moment, the specific weight of what was being acknowledged without being said.
Then Bingley said something to the room that required a response, and the room gave the response, and the conversation moved on in the direction that rooms moved when they had several people in them and all the people were present.
Darcy and Elizabeth went on talking in the way they had been talking, which was through the room rather than only to each other, and which was its own kind of conversation, and which was getting them, she thought, somewhere.
After an hour the visit concluded in the way that Netherfield visits to Longbourn concluded: with Mrs. Bennet pressing additional refreshment and Bingley accepting it with the easy warmth of a man who always enjoyed what was offered, and the eventual, gradual movement toward the hall and coats and horses.
She found herself, in the movement, standing beside Jane.
They stood at the window and watched the carriage go, and the carriage took a while to go because Bingley was saying goodbye with the characteristic warmth of a man for whom goodbyes were a pleasure rather than a formality, and Jane watched the carriage with the expression she had been wearing since Bingley came in, which was the expression of someone whose composure was doing significant work.
When the carriage was gone Jane turned from the window.
Elizabeth looked at her.
"He will come back tomorrow," Jane said quietly. She said it not as a question.
"I expect he will," Elizabeth said.
Jane looked at her sister. She looked at her with the specific, loving attention that Jane applied to Elizabeth, which was attentive without being intrusive, warm without being pressing, the look of a sister who loved her and was not going to pretend she did not see what she saw.
"You have been different," Jane said. "Since Pemberley."
Elizabeth considered denying the different. She considered making something light of it. She considered the various available deflections, which she was very good at and which she had been applying to Jane in various forms since November.
She thought: she is Jane. She has been waiting for me to say the true thing since October.
"I have been wrong about him," Elizabeth said. "Not entirely and not simply. But I have been wrong about the important things. About his character and about mine."
Jane was very quiet for a moment.
"I know," she said.
"You have known for some time."
"Yes." Jane said it without anything in it except the honest acknowledgment. She did not say she had tried to tell Elizabeth. She did not say she had seen it coming. She only said yes, which was the most generous possible response and the most Jane one.
Elizabeth looked at her sister.
She thought about six months of carrying the doorway. She thought about what she had built from it and what the building had cost and what she was now in the process of laying down, slowly, piece by piece, in the places where the building had been.
"I don't know what to do about it," she said. "About what to say or how or when." She paused. "I know what I want to say. I have known for some time what I want to say. I simply have not had the occasion to say it in the right way."
Jane looked at her with the warm, direct look of a woman who had spent six months watching her sister be very intelligent and somewhat mistaken and had loved her completely throughout.
"Lizzy," she said.
"Yes."
"I think you do know when." She said it gently, with the specific gentleness of someone who was not pushing but was giving permission. "I think you have known since Pemberley. Perhaps longer."
Elizabeth looked out the window at the lane where the carriage had been.
"Perhaps," she said.
"And I think," Jane said, "that waiting for it to be perfect is a different thing from waiting for it to be right. And I think you know which one you are doing."
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment.
She thought about burning the letter at midnight. She thought about what she had been waiting for since, which she had been calling the right occasion and which she was now willing to call, with the precision she had been learning to apply to herself, something else.
She had been afraid.
Not of the saying. Not of what she was going to say.
She had been afraid of saying it without the certainty that it would be received as she meant it, which was the specific fear of a woman who had been wrong about the most important assessment she had made in recent memory and was not certain of her ability to be right.
She thought: that fear is not going to go away by waiting.
She thought: I am going to have to say the thing while the fear is still present. That is what the saying requires.
She turned to Jane.
"Tomorrow," she said.
Jane's expression did the thing it did when she was happy: it tried not to show and failed.
"Good," she said. She said it with the warmth that was the truest version of her. Then she took Elizabeth's hand and held it for a moment, the way she had held it at five years old and at fifteen and at twenty and at every point between.
Elizabeth held her sister's hand in the Longbourn drawing room with the afternoon going long at the windows and the household settling into its evening self around them, and she thought: tomorrow.
She thought it with the quality she was aiming for.
Not certainty. Something more honest than certainty.
Readiness.