Chapter Eleven
“This is the most self-satisfied prose I have ever met with between two covers,” said Cecilia, to no one in particular.
The library was empty, but she had not expected it to stay that way.
The evenings here had begun as reconnaissance, a wish to know the room thoroughly as she meant to use it.
Instead, they had become, without her quite deciding it, the hinge of her day, the few hours after the children were down and the household had gone quiet in which she let herself stop being useful and simply be.
Three evenings ago, she had taken down a volume of philosophy that the shelf had made sound a great deal more interesting than it was, and she was now on page sixty-two, but the author had not improved.
“The notion,” she informed the fire, “that the mere length of a sentence is the measure of the depth of a thought is one of the most persistent errors in the whole tradition, and you have committed it on every page since Chapter Three.”
“Which tradition?”
She turned. Gideon stood in the doorway with a book in one hand, looking like a man who had arrived at his habitual destination to find it occupied, not displeased so much as recalculating.
His cravat was loosened when he believed no one would see it, and that was something that she needed to catalogue as well.
“Rationalist philosophy. This edition.”
He looked at the volume in her hand, and the corner of his mouth did the small thing she had learned to watch for. “Principia Rationalis.”
“You have read it.”
“I have attempted it. Twice. The second attempt did nothing to improve my opinion of the first.”
She held the book up. “He spends fourteen pages in Chapter Four establishing a premise any competent thinker would have disposed of in two sentences.”
“Sixteen, if you count the footnotes, which he plainly intends that you should.” He came in then.
It was not a decision so much as the discovery that the alternative was for one of them to leave, and leaving would have required either an explanation or an admitted awkwardness, and they were equally disinclined to both.
He went to the desk at the far end. She returned to the settee by the fire, and the room settled around the two of them without the least objection, built as it had been to be used and not merely looked at.
She read. The November wind moved in the beeches, the fire kept up its work, and the quiet between them was the kind that two people make when each is busy at a thing of their own choosing and content to be busy at it in company.
She was not accustomed to a silence that felt like company.
She spent a quarter of an hour examining the novelty of it with the same care she gave everything in this house that surprised her.
“He is about to argue,” she said at last, without looking up, “that rational agency requires the total suppression of sentiment, and he is about to present it as a daring new position, despite having said the same thing in Chapter One with a different set of words.”
A pause came from the direction of the desk. “He argues, further, that the suppression of sentiment is not only possible but to be desired, which is the sort of claim a man can make with real confidence only if he has never once attempted it.”
She looked up. He was not looking at her. He was bent over his paper, his pen moving, his face perfectly composed, and there was nothing whatever in his posture to suggest he had said a thing that was at once an argument about philosophy and an argument about something else entirely.
“He would say,” she observed, after a moment, “that your remark is itself a symptom of insufficient rational development.”
“He would be wrong about that, as about most things.”
“Indeed. He would.”
The silence after that one was warmer than the silence before it.
***
It became a habit before she noticed it had become structural, the way the truest habits install themselves in the architecture of one’s days while one is looking elsewhere.
They both came to the library in the evenings.
They kept to their ends of it, the fire and a sensible distance between them, and they read.
Sometimes, instead of reading, they talked, but the talking felt like a conversation that had been running a good deal longer than it had technically been occurring.
She learned a great many things about him there that she learned nowhere else. One evening, she nodded toward the corridor that led to the study she was forbidden to enter.
“You design buildings. I have seen the edges of it through the door, before you tell me I was not meant to.”
“I design them. I do not build them, which is most of the difference between a pleasure and a profession.”
“What is the pleasure of it, then?”
He considered the question as though no one had put it to him in a very long time, which she rather thought was the case.
“A room may welcome a person or refuse them, by nothing more than where the light is let to fall and how the eye is led through it. Most houses are thrown up by men who never once think of it, and you feel the lack the moment you cross the threshold, the way you feel a draught from a door left ajar. I find I would rather draw the kind of person who does not want to leave.” He stopped, as though he had let out more than he intended.
“It is a foolish way to spend a life, drawing rooms one will never put up.”
“It is not in the least foolish to know precisely what sort of welcome you would build, if anyone ever thought to ask you for one.” She held his eye. “It only seems foolish to a man who has decided in advance that no one will ask.”
He gave no answer to that. But the corner of his mouth moved, and he turned back to his paper, and she counted it a point to her.
“You ask me a great many questions,” he said, another evening, “and answer almost none in return. I have only lately noticed how tidy an arrangement it is, and how entirely one-sided.”
“There is very little to tell. Eight years of being useful to a woman who required it and resented the requirement. It does not make much of a story.”
“It makes you the woman taking a philosophy book apart in my library at midnight. I find I am interested in how she came to be there, which you may believe or not, knowing my general indifference to most things.”
“My father was a gentleman with a great many more books than he had sense, and no money to speak of behind either.” She kept her eyes on the fire.
“When he died, there was nothing. The Wrens of Devonshire found they could not quite recall the connection, but Lady Foskett found she could make use of one. So, I learned to be necessary, because necessary is the nearest thing to safe that a woman without a penny is ever allowed to come.”
“And here?” he asked after a moment. “Are you necessary here, Miss Wren, or are you safe?”
She looked at him across the fire for a long moment. “I have not yet decided. I will tell you the day I do.”
She learned that he had read very nearly everything in the room and thought hard about most of it.
She learned that he found natural history genuinely interesting, not as a drawing-room accomplishment but with the plain curiosity of a man who liked to know how a thing worked.
And she learned, on a Tuesday evening in the third week of November, that he was funny.
She had taken to reading aloud some evenings, when a book was either very good or so thoroughly bad that sharing it seemed the only fit response.
That evening, it was a natural history of the English hedgerow, shelved between two volumes of political economy and a far more honest book than either.
She read a passage on the common dormouse that the author had written with genuine biographical warmth.
“The dormouse,” she read, “unlike a good many of its neighbours, approaches the business of winter with a philosophy that creatures of more anxious constitution might envy. It simply declines to participate.” She paused. “I believe this man is describing an ideal.”
From the desk, with nothing at all to herald its arrival, came his voice. “He is describing a duke in November.”
She laughed. It was a full laugh, the kind that arrived before a person could manage it and had nothing self-conscious in it because it was finished before self-consciousness could engage. She lowered her hand and looked at him.
He was looking at her. He had turned fully from the desk, his left side given to her as much as his right, the way he seldom sat, and his face wore something she had not seen on it before, more open than the almost-smile and not yet reclaimed by the wariness that usually lived there.
He looked, for a moment, startled, as though he had just been handed evidence for a thing he had not known was possible.
There he was, she found herself thinking, with a clarity that arrived unbidden. There was the man who had been there before all the rest of it had been built on top of him.
He looked away, turned back to the desk, and the care came back into his posture, and the moment closed over smoothly and quickly.
But it had happened, and she had seen it, and the corner of his mouth had moved in the private way it moved when a thing was genuinely funny to him.
She added both to the account she was still insisting to herself she was not keeping.
They never spoke of it afterwards. That was the library’s first principle that she had come to understand.
What happened there needed no explanation.
It settled into the peaceful quiet that grew each evening: gradually warmer and closer together.
The space between the desk and the chair by the fire seemed to shrink, though it was hardly noticeable.
A stranger walking in would see only a man working and a woman reading, and would be mistaken about everything else
The things that passed in the library asked for no discussion and got none.
They gathered instead in the quality of the silence that came after, and she had grown fluent in that silence, could read its temperature now as plainly as print.
She went up that night with the warmth of the room still on her and did not sleep easily, lying instead with the fire’s afterglow behind her eyes and the low even sound of his voice still somewhere in her ears.
She was growing accustomed to lying awake, and she had begun, she noticed, to mind it rather less than a sensible woman ought.