Chapter 40 #2
The conversation at the centre of the table did not stop, but it thinned perceptibly, the way a stream thinned when a stone was placed in its current.
Lady Matlock, three seats away, did not turn her head.
She did not need to. Her attention had been on him since the first course, with the quality of a trainer watching a horse approach a fence that he was not entirely confident it would clear.
Miss Arenden rallied. She was, he would grant her, determined. “How very singular. I had not heard of gentlemen taking up—that is to say, lightkeeping is not a profession one typically associates with—”
“With my station. No. It is not.”
He had offered her nothing. He was offering her nothing with every syllable, constructing a wall of brevity and bluntness that a more stubborn woman might have climbed, but that Miss Arenden, who was young and well-bred and had done nothing to deserve this treatment, could not reasonably be expected to scale.
He was being unkind. Not deliberately—he did not wish to wound her—but inevitably, because every word she spoke required him to respond, and every response required him to be someone he was not, and the effort of the pretence was a thing he could not sustain through four courses and a dessert.
He tried. For Georgiana’s sake, for Lady Matlock’s, for the sake of the name that would need these drawing rooms and these dinner tables to receive his sister when the season came, he tried.
He asked Miss Arenden about her family. He asked about York.
He listened to her account of a musical performance she had attended at Hanover Square and produced what he hoped were appropriate sounds of interest. He ate his fish.
He drank his wine. He performed the mechanics of a social evening with the competence of a man assembling a mechanism he had been trained to assemble, but for which he had no natural aptitude.
It was not enough. It showed in the careful way Miss Arenden turned her attention to the gentleman on her other side after the third course—not with relief, precisely, but with the profound gratitude of someone who had been carrying a heavy parcel and had finally been permitted to set it down.
It was there in the glance Lady Matlock directed at him across the table during the dessert—a glance that contained no anger but a weariness he recognised, the weariness of a woman who had expected difficulty and had received exactly what she expected.
If Elizabeth had been there, she would have lasted perhaps ten minutes in this room before saying something so direct that half the table would have choked on their wine and the other half would have wanted to applaud.
He could see her in the chair beside him as clearly as if she were there—the sly look, the dry observation delivered just below the volume of general conversation, meant for him alone.
She would have been magnificent, and she would have been impossible, and he would have been content just kindling that spark and letting her shine.
“You were abominable.”
Lady Matlock regarded the ritual of pouring tea after a difficult dinner as both a restoration and a reckoning.
The guests had departed. Lord Matlock had retired.
Richard had vanished with the diplomatic instinct of a man who knew when a room was about to become a battlefield and preferred to observe the aftermath rather than the engagement.
“I was civil.”
“You were civil the way a wall is civil. It stands. It does not invite. Miss Arenden is a pleasant young woman with a perfectly adequate understanding and a father who would be honoured by the connexion, and you treated her as though she were a customs inspection.”
“I told her about the lighthouse.”
“You told her you were a lightkeeper! At a dinner table. In the second course.” Lady Matlock set down the pot.
“Fitzwilliam, I did not ask you to propose marriage to the girl. I asked you to make conversation for the duration of a meal. Children manage this. Foreign ambassadors who speak no English manage this. You sat beside a young woman of good family and good humour and made her feel as though she were intruding upon your evening.”
He had no defence. She was correct. He had done precisely what she described. It had not been deliberate, but it had been thorough, and the thoroughness was its own indictment.
“It will not always be Miss Arenden,” Lady Matlock continued.
“There will be others. Some will be less agreeable. Some will be considerably less scrupulous—I can name three families within this parish who would overlook a five-year absence and a lighthouse and a good deal more besides if the fortune attached to the name were sufficient, and your fortune is more than sufficient. They will come calling whether you welcome them or not. That is the world your sister must enter. If you cannot navigate it with grace, then at least navigate it with endurance, but do not imagine you can avoid it entirely without consequences that fall upon Georgiana rather than upon yourself.”
He took his tea. The cup was fine china, painted with a delicacy that belonged to another century’s understanding of what mattered. He held it in hands that had hauled oil casks and split kindling and gripped the sodden skirts of a woman he had dragged from the sea.
“I am aware of the obligation,” he said. “I am not indifferent to it. I am simply not equal to performing it as you would wish.”
“Not yet.” Lady Matlock regarded him over the rim of her cup.
“But you will learn, or you will doom your sister to entering society with a guardian whose reputation precedes him in all the wrong ways. You managed a lighthouse for five years. You can manage a dining room for an evening. The skills are not so very different—both require tending, both require vigilance, and both require the willingness to remain at one’s post when the weather turns foul. ”
The comparison startled him. Not because it was wrong, but because it was so precisely right that it could only have been intentional. Perhaps his aunt understood more about what the lighthouse had been to him than he had supposed her capable of understanding.
“One more dinner,” she said. “Next week. Smaller. I will seat you beside Mrs Davenport, who is sixty and deaf in one ear and will not require anything from you that a moderate effort at volume cannot supply. Consider it a convalescence.”
He almost smiled. Lady Matlock saw it and did not remark upon it, which was the kindest thing she had done since his arrival.
He wrote to Elizabeth that evening, in his room, with Bella asleep at his feet and the London dark against the window.
Not the dark of the coast—not the clean, absolute dark of a headland where the only light was the one you tended—but the soiled dark of a city that never fully extinguished itself.
The street lamps and the carriage lights and the yellow glow from a hundred thousand windows producing a murky twilight that was neither night nor day but something in between, something undecided, something that refused to commit to either condition.
He took out paper and uncapped the ink, and then he sat with the pen in his hand and the nib drying. It was not hesitation but a sort of excavation—the slow work of digging through the sediment of the day to find the thing beneath it that was true enough to set down on paper and send north.
Dear Miss Bennet,
The London house is being opened. This is a larger undertaking than I had anticipated, involving tradespeople and fabrics and the opinions of persons whose authority in matters of upholstery I am expected to defer to without question.
I defer. I sign. I choose between shades of pinkish yellow that are, to my eye, identical, and I am assured that my choice is sound, though I suspect the assurance would have been offered regardless of which shade I selected.
The house will be habitable by March. I confess I find the word ‘habitable’ a strange one to apply to a residence of fourteen rooms, four fireplaces, and no draught whatsoever.
I have lived in habitable quarters. They were twelve feet across and heated by a rusted coal stove.
I attended a dinner this evening. I was not good company.
I lack the facility for conversation that this world requires; the lightness, the ease, the willingness to speak at length about things that do not matter so that the things that do matter may be approached by degrees rather than head-on.
I was raised for this. I was taught its forms. I have forgot them, or perhaps I never truly learned them.
I sat beside a young woman whose only fault was that she was not you, which is not her fault at all, but which made the evening very long.
He stopped. He read the sentence back. He dipped the pen and drew a line through whose only fault was that she was not you and wrote above it: who made admirable efforts at conversation that I was not able to adequately return.
The crossed-out line was still visible beneath the correction.
She would see it. She would read both sentences—the one he had permitted and the one he had retracted—and she would understand why he had written the first and why he had not been able to let it stand, and the understanding would carry more than either sentence alone.
Georgiana continues well. She played for me again yesterday, a Haydn sonata.
Chosen, I believe, without ulterior motive, which represents considerable progress in our relations.
She asked after you. I told her what I could, which is less than she wished to know and more than I had intended to reveal, and the disparity between those quantities was, I gather, informative.
The obligations here multiply. Each one is small.
Each one is reasonable. Each one delays my return by a day or a week, and the days accumulate the way sand accumulates in a glass, grain by grain, until the weight is insufferable and the turning of the glass seems very far away.
I do not mean to be detained. I do not mean to be absorbed.
But the world here has a gravity that the headland does not, and I find that I must resist it consciously, as one resists a current, lest it carry me further from shore than I intend.
I will return. But I cannot yet say when, and the inability to say when is the thing that costs me most to write and will, I fear, cost you most to read.
The country here is grey. Not your grey—not the grey of the sea and the stone and the sky that delivers its weather directly into one’s face. A lesser grey. An undecided grey. I find I have very little patience for things that will not commit to what they are.
Yours,
W. Darcy
He sealed the letter and placed it on the desk. Bella sighed in her sleep at his feet—the simple exhalation of an old dog who had found a warm place and required nothing else from the evening.
He reached down and rested his hand on her head.
She did not wake. He sat at the desk in the London dark with his hand on his dog and the letter on the desk and the stone in his pocket, and he wanted to go home.
The distance between this desk and that tower was not miles, but dinners and fabrics and shades of yellow and the slow, courteous, civilised suffocation of a man being pulled by gravity away from the only shore that mattered.
Tomorrow there would be another appointment. Another signature. Another obligation that was small and reasonable, and would delay his return by another day.