Chapter Twenty-Three
“Papa, I have made a tour. You are to come, and Nor is to come, and you are each to bring a button, because it is tuppence to get in and I do not take credit.”
“A button each. And what does the tuppence buy us?”
“The Grand Tour of Rothmere Hall, with a guide who has read everything and been everywhere, which is me. There is a book. I wrote the book. Some of the spelling is the way I wanted it and not the way Nor wanted it. I have decided that is allowed, because it is my country and a guide may spell his own country how he likes.”
He had been at it for three days. Elinor had watched the preparations from the edges.
So, she came down on the appointed afternoon with a button in her glove and her husband beside her with his.
A boy of eight stood waiting at the foot of the great stair, a rolled paper in his hand and the weary authority of a man who had guided fools through finer galleries than this.
“Tickets,” said Theo, and took their button. Then he put them in a jar that already held three, which she understood to be his nurse’s, and Mrs Garnett’s, and one she chose not to ask about.
“Is that a book I know?” she asked.
“It used to be the weather book. The one I kept of whether Papa was a fair day or a storm, so I should know whether it was safe to be in a room with him.” He said it with no weight at all, sorting his tickets, in the voice he used now for the things that had stopped being able to hurt him.
“I do not need it for the weather now. Papa is mostly fair, and on the days that he is not, he says so out loud before I have to guess, which is a rule we made and he keeps. So, I rubbed the weather out and put the countries in. A book ought to be useful. A book about whether your Papa is cross at you stops being useful the day he stops, and then you may have it for better things.”
Elinor did not look at her husband. She had learned that some things a man must be let to receive without an audience, even an audience of one who loves him, and a weather book put away unneeded was plainly one of them.
“We begin at the harbour, because all tours begin at a harbour, and ours is here.”
The harbour was the map room. He had hung the mended map where it could be seen from the doorway, and set the coins out beneath it.
He stood under the map with his rolled guidebook and explained to the two adults, who had between them crossed less of the world than the room described, that a traveller must always begin by knowing where he means to end.
It was a thing Nor had told him, and he was passing it off entirely as his own.
“You go by the coins.” He walked one across the map with a fingertip.
“This is for the sea you cross, and this is for the mountains, and this fat one is for Rome, because Rome is the dearest country and you save up for it. Nor taught me the routes and Papa taught me the disasters, and a tour is mostly the disasters. The rest is only weather and pictures, Papa says.”
“From here a sensible person goes to France first. But we cannot go to France today because France is the music room and the music room is being polished. So, we will do Italy, which is downstairs, and smells of dinner.”
“It would,” Nathaniel said. “Italy always does.”
“France we shall have to imagine, which Nor says is the best way to have most things.” He consulted the rolled paper with a frown.
“France is where you go slowly and eat for a very long time, and nobody hurries you. Papa went through it fast the first time and saw none of it, so this time we go at the speed of an old dog, the guidebook says, and stop whenever anybody wishes to look at anything at all.”
“The guidebook is wise. A good deal wiser than its author was at four-and-twenty.”
“Italy is the kitchen, and the guidebook says you are to be given a spoon of something by a cross woman who pretends she does not want you there but actually does. That is the whole of Italy, the guidebook says, the pretending and the spoon.”
Mrs Coombe had been warned and was furious about it, in the manner she kept for things that secretly pleased her. She gave them each a spoon of the Italian rice she had not been asked to make but had made anyway.
The orangery was Greece. Elinor had braced for the orangery.
The last time the three of them had been in it together there had been a storm, and a lost boy, and a man on his knees in the muck.
She did not know what a child did with a room like that, whether he buried it or walled it off or simply never went back to it.
Theo had made it a temple.
“This is Greece, and it is mostly broken on purpose, because the best places are, Nor says, and you are meant to stand in the broken part and imagine the rest.” He stood among the cold orange trees in the watery light, and was not, she saw, afraid of the room at all.
He had taken the worst night of his life and made it a ruin one visits on purpose.
She thought it very possibly the healthiest thing she had ever watched anyone do with grief.
Children, she was coming to learn, were a great deal cleverer about the heart than the people paid to improve them.
“Did you know,” Theo said, “that Papa once rode a mule called Achille over a mountain, and the mule sat down in the middle and would not get up for an hour, and Papa had to read to it?”
“I did know that. A very reliable source told me.”
“It is in the guidebook. It is the best part. I put it under Greece because it is the part with a mountain. There is also the inn that leaked, where the bed was an island by morning and Papa and the innkeeper argued the price of the rain, but I put the inn under France, because Papa said it leaked in France, and a guide must put things where they happened even when they would fit better somewhere else.”
“The gallery is the museum, where the pictures live. Every country has one, and ours is up the stairs.” He led them up, and stopped at last before the fair grave woman in the half-turn, who hung now in the long gallery in the ordinary afternoon light, among the other Vales, in no shut room at all.
“This is the most important picture in the whole museum. It is my mother. She is allowed in the gallery now, with everybody, because we do not keep her in the dark any more. Papa says the dark is no place to keep a person you liked. You are to say good afternoon to her when you pass.”
“Good afternoon, Honoria,” Elinor said to the portrait, because it seemed the only possible thing to say, and the painted woman went on being about to ring for tea.
Nathaniel stood beside his wife, before the face of his first wife, and did not freeze, and that, Elinor thought, was the true end of the tour, whatever the guidebook had to say about Rome.
Rome was the library, last, because a person should earn Rome and you could not earn it by starting there, and Theo conducted them into the oldest room in the house with the air of a guide arriving at last at the thing the whole tour had been built to reach.
“This is Rome. It is the most important, and it is at the end, and the rule is you are quiet for a minute when you come in, because it is older than everybody, even Papa.” He let the minute pass, more or less, with the approximate patience of his age, and then he could not hold the rest of it.
“At the end of the real tour, the actual one, in the actual Rome, you are supposed to make a wish, the guidebook says, only I have used up the wish already, so it does not count, I am only telling you for when you go.”
“What did you wish?” Elinor asked, before she had decided whether she ought to.
“I am not telling, but it has come true, so it does not matter.” He rolled the guidebook and tucked it under his arm and looked, for a moment, exactly like the small grave woman in the portrait two floors up. “It was a short one. It was only the three of us, in a room, not minding the door.”
She did not trust her voice for a moment, and she did not have to, because Theo had already moved on to the practical, which was where he was happiest.
“May we make a real one? A real tour. The guidebook is only practice. I should like to check whether I have got Italy right, about the spoon.”
“Yes,” Nathaniel said.
He said it as he had learned to say the large things lately, plainly, with nothing braced behind it, and Theo received it with the particular stillness of a child who had asked for the moon as a formality and been handed it.
“When?”
“In the spring, when the roads are fit, and your Latin is fit, and Mrs Garnett has been persuaded that the house will stand without us, which will be the hardest country we cross. France slowly. Italy for the spoon. Greece for the mountains. Rome last, for the wish you have wasted and shall have to make again.”
“And Nor comes. It is not a tour without Nor. The guidebook is firm.”
“Nor comes. There is no tour without Nor, and barely a breakfast. The management would not hear of it.”
“I shall need a better book.”
“You shall have the best book in the house for it,” Elinor said.
“There is a blue one. I have been keeping it for the places already known by heart and not yet seen, which is the whole of what a tour is. We shall write the real one in it as we go, all three hands, and the spelling may be yours in your part, since it is your country too.”
“Is it the blue one with the writing in the front? The one I am not allowed to read because it is Papa’s and yours?”
“It is. And you may read the writing now, I think, since the three of us are to be in the book together. It says, for the places already known by heart, and not yet seen.”
Theo turned this over with the seriousness he gave to the only things that mattered to him, which were maps and fairness and, lately, this.
“That is us. We know them by heart and have not seen them. That is the whole family, written in the front of a book before we have even gone.”
Theo went up to find his nurse. Elinor stood in the library that was Rome with her husband, and found that the tour had emptied her of something she had not known she was still carrying.
“Do you ever regret it?” she asked. “Marrying a governess. The county will tell you that you ought, when it has finished telling you the other thing.”
“Frequently.”
She had not expected that, and he let her not expect it for exactly as long as it took to be cruel, which in him was no time at all.
“I regret every day of the year I spent in this house not married to you. I regret calling it employment when I knew by the second month it was not. I regret the wet afternoon you mended that map on the floor and I thanked you as though you had fetched my boots, when what I wanted to say I had no words for and would not have said if I had. I keep a quantity of regrets, Elinor. The marriage is not among them. The marriage is the one ledger entry in eight years I have never once wished to revise.”
“I did not set out to reform you. I want that on the record. I came to teach a boy his rivers.”
“You did not set out to. You did something a great deal worse.” He was quiet for a moment.
“You made me wish to be. I had stopped, you understand. Not wishing to be better, that is a thing men say. And then there was a governess in a wet travelling dress who declined to be frightened of me, and somewhere in the year of her I began to wish to be in the room I was standing in. That is the whole of what you did. It does not sound like much, but it is the only thing that has ever happened to me.”
“You were not a project,” she said. “I want that on the record beside the rest. I did not mend you. I have known a great many men who wished to be mended by a patient woman, and I did not marry any of them, because a man who wishes to be mended only wishes to be let alone more comfortably.”
“I did not wish to be mended. I had given up wishing to be anything at all, which is a deeper thing than wanting repair.” He turned the old coin of it over once more, the slow way.
“You did not do it on purpose. That is the part I find I cannot get over. You came for the wage and the boy, and you reformed nothing, and changed everything, by the simple criminal act of being a person in my house I wished to be in the room with.”
“It sounds,” she said, when she could, “like a great deal.”
“It was tuppence. I had the button on me the whole time and never thought to spend it.” He took her hand, in the room that was Rome. “Where would you like to go first, Your Grace, when the spring comes, and we are let out into the world at last?”
“Anywhere the three of us are, in a room, not minding the door.” She heard the boy’s wasted wish come out of her own mouth and did not try to take it back, because it was the truest map she had, and she had given up, somewhere across the year, the habit of wanting anything smaller.