Chapter 41
The letter to Italy was sent on Thursday.
Leonora found him writing it in the study with the door open, which was a change, for the door had been shut every day since May.
“You may read it,” Colin said, without looking up. “It is four lines, and three of them are about money.”
“I will not read your letter to your brother.”
“You may read every letter I write for the rest of my life, and I would be obliged if you would, because you will find the thing I have failed to say and put it in the margin.” He signed it. “There. Tell me what I have left out.”
Leonora did not read it at once. Instead, she sat down on the arm of the chair and looked at his desk, which she had never properly looked at before—the japanned box at the corner with the correspondence in it, the estate ledgers, the inkstand with the chip out of the base that had clearly been there since he was a boy.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Do you miss him?”
Colin put the pen down.
“Every day,” he admitted. “That is the part nobody understands, because everybody in this county has decided that my brother is a scoundrel and that I am a martyr, and they are both approximately true and neither is any use. He is the only person left who is mine. Mrs. Pike remembers my mother better than either of us and I thank God for it, but she remembers her as a servant remembers a mistress. William is the only creature alive who was her child, and he is in Italy, because I made him a life so soft that he could go.”
“That is not the whole reason he left.”
“No,” Colin agreed. “He left because he got a woman with child and could not face it. I have not forgiven that, and I do not intend to. But he could only run because there has never once been anything at his back. I saw to that. I was fifteen, and I decided that he should never be frightened of anything for the rest of his life. I kept to it, and what I have made is a man of one-and-twenty who cannot stand to be uncomfortable for an afternoon.”
Leonora was quiet for a moment.
“You will not do that to Katherine.”
“No.”
“You will not, Colin. I have watched you all week. On the day Agnes wrote, you sat on a nursery floor with a seven-month-old who could not understand one word and told her about her father anyway, out loud, in an empty room, because you had decided she should hear it from you and hear it true.” She came round the desk and put her hand on his shoulder.
“That is the opposite of what you did for William, and you did it without being asked. You had better know that you did it.”
Colin turned the pen over in his fingers.
“She will hate me for a year when she is grown,” he sighed. “Somewhere about seventeen. She will find out the truth, and she will hate me for a year.”
“Very likely.”
“And I shall let her.”
“Yes,” Leonora said. “You will. And then she will come back, because they do come back if you let them go, and she will be about twenty, and she will sit in the gallery and ask you what her mother was like. And you will tell her the truth about her too.”
She rose, rounded the desk to stand behind his chair, and read four lines over his shoulder.
He had told William that the debts at Ludlow were settled, that Katherine was well and had cut four teeth and could cross a room, and that a horse he had been carving for eleven weeks was finished and was already being dragged about by the tail.
He had also told him that the north field was drained.
There was nothing in it about a wife, or a lake, or a treehouse.
“You have left out everything,” Leonora noted.
“I know. That is why the door is open.”
Colin turned the page over and wrote four more lines, slowly, with his ears going red, and did not let her see them. Then he sealed it.
“You have written four lines about a wooden horse to a man you have not seen in a year.”
“I am aware.”
“He will read it in Florence and know exactly what it means. He will not be able to say so either, because you have both been raised in the same house by the same man.” Leonora put her hand on his shoulder. “What did you say?”
“I told him that I have married a woman who lights up rooms,” Colin said, “that he will meet her when he can bear to come home, and that he need not be frightened of it, because there is no longer anybody in this house who is keeping an account of what he owes.”
The gallery took him until Friday.
Leonora did not go in. That was the hardest four days of the week, and she did it by finding a great deal to do at the other end of the house, and by not asking Mrs. Pike anything, and by refusing on Wednesday to look up when she heard a ladder being carried down the corridor.
On Friday evening, he found her in the nursery.
“You may come and see it now.”
The curtains were open the whole length of the south side, and the low light was spilling across the boards. At the north end, on the wall that had had nothing on it for fifteen years, hung four feet of a green garden in June.
Leonora stood in front of it for a long while.
“It is the right wall,” she remarked.
“It gets the sun until six.”
“It is the right wall, Colin, and you knew it in a drawing room a week ago and could not say so.” She looped her hand through his arm. “And the other?”
Colin looked down the gallery to where eleven feet of black Holland cloth was still propped against the paneling.
“Not yet,” he murmured.
“That is not a no.”
“No, it is not a no. It is the first time in fifteen years it has not been a no, and I should like to leave it there for a while and get used to the feeling.”
“Then leave it there for as long as you like.” Leonora smiled. “It is not going anywhere, and neither am I.”
“There is something I have never told anybody,” Colin admitted.
“You do not need to.”
“I would like to. I am practicing.” He was looking at the black Holland cover.
“I sat in front of it. After. For about a year, when I was sixteen. Before I had it taken down. I used to come in here at night and sit on the floor in front of it, exactly where my father used to sit, with a bottle I never opened, because I wanted to know what it had felt like for him.”
Leonora did not say anything at all.
“And then, one night, I realized that I had been doing it for a year, and that I was sixteen and sitting in the dark in the same spot my father used to, with the same bottle beside me. So I got up, had the painting taken down the next morning, and I never came into this room again. That is the whole story of the covered painting. It is a great deal less interesting than everybody has always assumed.”
“It is not less interesting.”
“It is about a boy who was frightened of turning into his father.”
“Yes,” Leonora acknowledged. “But he did not.”
They stood in the gallery a while longer as the light shifted across the floorboards.
“There is one more thing,” Colin added, “and you are not going to care for it.”
“Say it.”
“The ballroom.”
Leonora turned her head.
“Your friend said something to you in it, in June,” he said.
“You said you would write it down, and you did, because I have found it on a sheet of paper in the household ledger and I have no shame whatsoever about having read it.” He was looking straight ahead.
“Four hundred people. On our terms and not theirs. At the top of the room, together, and every one of them obliged to be civil to my face.”
“Colin, I wrote that in May. I was being fanciful.”
“You were being correct,” he countered. “I should like to do it at Christmas. I have been thinking about it since Tuesday. I have got as far as the shutters; I would be obliged if you take over the rest of it, because I have not the first notion how one asks four hundred people to come to a house they are frightened of.”
Leonora put both hands over her mouth. “You are going to open the ballroom.”
“I am going to open the entire house,” Colin declared, “and you are going to tell me how, and I am going to be extremely disagreeable about the flowers.”