Chapter Seven #2
“I read it just now. While waiting for you to appear in the doorway, which I assumed would happen eventually, because you appear in doorways the way weather appears in England.”
Thomas’s mouth moved. The movement was closer to a smile than any she had seen from him in a context that was not related to her work. The closeness was significant, because it meant the smile was personal.
“The poem argues,” Thomas said, “that the best companion is one who does not require constant speech, who can sit in a room with another person and let the silence exist without any rush to fill it.”
“That would seem to imply a companion of a most peculiar and specific nature.”
“It does.”
“Such a description implies a companion who understands that a stillness between friends is not to be mistaken for an absence of feeling.”
“That is exactly what it is,” Thomas said.
“It sounds,” Jane said, and her voice was careful because the conversation had moved into territory that felt less like poetry and more like something else, “like a companion you have been looking for.”
Thomas looked at her. The looking was direct and open and held none of the careful barriers she had grown accustomed to. For a moment, in the grey light with Cowper between them, Thomas Bennister looked at Jane Rennet as though she were the answer to a question he had been seeking for four years.
“Perhaps,” he said.
The word hung in the library. It was not a declaration. It was a mere whisper of acknowledgment that something unacknowledged now linked their hearts, offered with all the caution of a man who could no longer pretend his feelings were not existent.
Jane held the Cowper and felt the library rearrange itself around the word, and the rearranging was warm and frightening and exactly the kind of thing she had been telling herself she could not afford to feel.
“You should read more of him,” Thomas said, and the sentence was a retreat, a step back from the edge. “The garden poems are excellent.”
“I will. Thank you.”
“You may borrow anything from this library.”
“You said that already.”
“I am filling the silence, which is ironic given the subject of our conversation.”
Jane smiled. The smile was involuntary, directed at a man who had just seen fit to make a jest upon the subject of his own inability to stop talking after four years of barely speaking.
The jest was the most genuinely felt expression Mr. Thomas had yet addressed to her since she had come under his roof, stripping away the formality that had previously stood between them.
“Would you like me to read aloud?” Jane asked.
The question surprised them both. Jane had not planned to ask it. The asking came from the involuntary place, the place that responded to Thomas before her caution could intervene.
“Yes,” Thomas said, and the word came quickly, quickly enough that he had not weighed it first.
Jane opened the Cowper to the beginning and read.
Her voice was not a reading voice. It was her speaking voice, the same voice that talked about pastry and argued with Mrs. Vale and told Whitlock his custard concerns were excessive.
She did not perform the poetry. She delivered it the way she delivered everything, directly and without ornament, and the directness was right because Cowper was direct and Thomas would have been embarrassed by performance.
She read for twenty minutes while the rain went on and the fire settled, and Thomas sat with his coffee and listened with an attention that had nothing diagnostic in it and everything receptive, the attention of a man taking in something he needed, and the need had little to do with poetry and a great deal to do with the sound of a human voice in a room that had been too quiet too long, reading aloud the words he had read alone for years.
She paused at the end of a stanza and found his eyes closed, not in a slumber, in the deep listening that closing one’s eyes produces, the kind that takes away the seeing and sharpens all the rest. What she saw in his face then she had not seen there before, and it was not the careful managed stillness he wore like armour.
It was peace, genuine and unperformed, the peace of a man who had heard a voice he needed in a room where he had been alone too long.
She continued reading. The next passage was about evening and lamplight and the deep comfort of a room where two people sit without needing to justify the sitting, and the passage was so precisely a description of what was happening in this library at this moment that Jane’s voice caught on a line and she had to stop and breathe before continuing.
Thomas opened his eyes. “Are you quite well?”
“The poem is very accurate.”
“Cowper is often accurate. It is his most disconcerting quality.”
“He is describing this room.”
“He is describing every room where two people discover they prefer each other’s company to their own.
” Thomas paused, and the pause was the edge again, the place where the honest thing pressed against the cautious thing.
“He wrote it two hundred years ago and it is still true, which suggests the experience is not as rare as it feels.”
“Does it feel rare to you?”
“It feels unprecedented.”