Chapter 26 #3
“I am more than willing,” Albina said. “That is what surprises me. I thought that at my age I would be more cautious, instead I am sitting here telling you that I have not slept properly in two days because I keep thinking about an oak tree in Dorset.”
Temperance laughed at that, properly, the warm genuine one that Albina had spent three years collecting and still found extraordinary every time.
“An oak tree?” Temperance said.
“He described it to me at the picnic,” Albina said, entirely unashamed.
“For nearly twenty minutes. The age of it, the way the roots have spread, the particular quality of light it produces in late summer. And I sat there and listened to every word and thought that this man understands something about the world that I understand too, which is that the best things are old and rooted and have been there long enough to be impressive.” She paused.
“And then I thought that I was being very fanciful about an oak tree and that I ought to pay attention to the sandwiches.”
“And did you?”
“I did not,” Albina admitted. “I kept thinking about the tree.”
They sat together in the quiet morning sitting room, and the tea was warm and the light was good and outside the garden moved gently in a small breeze that had come up from the south.
Temperance was looking at her mother with the expression she had when she was feeling something she was not going to name directly, and Albina looked back at her and felt, for what seemed like the thousandth time in three years, the particular extraordinary warmth of being known by this person.
“I want to say something to you,” Albina said.
“All right,” Temperance said.
“I spent thirty years in a life that was not mine,” Albina said.
“Not because anyone put a gun to my head, but because I was twenty-two and I did not know what mine was supposed to look like, and I made the sensible choice and I lived inside it and I told myself for a very long time that sensible was enough.” She looked at Temperance steadily.
“It is not enough. I want you to know that, from someone who has been inside a sensible life for a very long time. It keeps the cold out, but only barely.”
Temperance was quiet.
“One must not stop living,” Albina said.
“That is what I have learned, at considerable cost and rather later than I would have liked. One must not stop living simply because one is no longer young, or because life has been unkind, or because it feels safer to want nothing than to want something and risk not having it.” She paused.
“The risk is worth it. I am quite certain of that now.”
“You are certain after two days?” Temperance said, gently.
“I am certain after forty-six years,” Albina said. “Two days simply confirmed it. Now, tell me what you think I should say when he calls on Thursday?”
Temperance looked at her. “You know what you should say.”
“I do,” Albina agreed. “But I would like to hear your opinion regardless.”
“Say yes,” Temperance said simply.
“To the courtship.”
“To all of it,” Temperance said. “Whatever he asks, within reason. Say yes.”
Albina looked at her daughter for a long moment with the warm, private expression that she had been wearing since the moment Temperance walked through her door three years ago and changed everything.
“You know,” she said, “for someone who has been very firm about not taking her own advice, you dispense it rather well.”
Temperance looked at her teacup. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do,” Albina said pleasantly.
Temperance said nothing. She reached for the plate of biscuits on the table between them and took one and looked at the garden, and Albina let her look, because that was one of the useful things about knowing someone well, the understanding of when to press and when to simply sit beside them and let them find their own way to the thing.
“He is a good man,” Temperance said, after a while. Not about Elias this time. The inflection was different.
“He is,” Albina agreed, in the same careful tone of a woman picking her way across uncertain ground.
“He is infuriating,” Temperance said.
“Also true,” Albina said.
“He makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.”
“Yes.”
“And he has absolutely no idea how to say what he means without saying seventeen other things first.”
“No,” Albina agreed. “He does not.”
Temperance ate her biscuit and looked at the garden and said nothing further.
Albina watched her daughter sit with whatever she was sitting with and felt the warmth of the morning and the particular gratitude of a woman who had been given back something she had lost, and who understood, better than most, what it meant to be given a second chance at the good things.
“Temperance,” she said.
“Mmm.”
“Do not wait too long.”
Temperance looked at her. Her expression was the composed one, the managed one, the one she had developed over twenty-two years of being in a place that required it. But underneath it, just at the edges, was something else, something warmer and less certain and considerably more honest.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said again.
“I know you don’t,” Albina said. “Think about it.”