Chapter 2 #3
Sophia had gone upstairs at eight, ostensibly to unpack the books she had brought, three, which even she considered restrained, and had stood at her window instead for a considerable time, looking over the rooftops at a sky that never entirely darkened here the way it did at Lockwood.
London did not permit real dark. The coal smoke held the light from below even at this hour, a low orange tinge at the horizon, and the moon, which would have been clean and white over the fields at home, sat in a haze of its own refraction and looked as though it too had been here long enough to acquire a London quality.
She had found the smell of the city on her clothes when she undressed.
Smoke and horse and something underneath both that was simply the smell of a great many lives being lived in close proximity, not unpleasant but entirely foreign, and she thought she would be able to identify it from a considerable distance once she had learned it properly.
She was learning it. That was the thing.
She had been in London for nine hours and she was already learning it, and the part of her that had come prepared to find it merely confirming was finding it instead — she looked for the word, and found that Sebastian’s word was still the most accurate. Various.
She sat at the writing table with the candle lit and the paper in front of her and thought about what she was going to write.
Not a journal. She had kept a journal since she was fourteen, a precise, sparsely written thing, observational rather than confessional, more natural history than diary.
This was not what she wanted. A journal was a record of what happened.
What she had in mind was something that did not record but argued, that did not observe from the outside but constructed a version of what was there that could show the machinery of it working.
The Season, she thought. The whole apparatus of it.
The mothers positioning daughters, the daughters performing the roles assigned to them, the men selecting and rejecting, the whole elaborate system dressed in silk and candlelight and presented to its participants as nothing less than the natural order of things.
She had seen it from the outside for twenty years.
She had watched Juliana be fed into it and nearly lost to it, and watched her refuse it finally at a cost that had been real and lasting, and she had watched Beatrice navigate the edges of it, excluded and then conditionally readmitted, and she had been the one standing back, noting everything, understanding the mechanism rather better than anyone who had been at its centre.
She had, she thought, the material for a very good novel.
Not a roman à clef, nothing so crude as a set of portraits under different names.
Something with an argument in it. A woman who understood the Season as a system and had set out to document it, and what happened to that understanding when the Season turned out to contain something she had not accounted for in her original scheme.
She would not think that far yet. That was the part that would require actual experience, actual observation, the thing Sebastian had argued for that she had been too proud to acknowledge directly, and was now, at her writing table on the first night in London, acknowledging to no one but herself.
She picked up the pen. Dipped it. Wrote at the top of the first sheet:
The Manners of Mayfair.
She looked at it. The title had arrived already formed, without effort, which was either a good sign or an indication that she had been composing this in some part of her mind since before she admitted to herself that she was going to do it at all. She did not cross it out.
Beneath it she wrote:
A Novel. Being an Account of the Marriage Market as Observed by a Young Woman of Good Understanding and Moderate Fortune, Who Went to London Expecting to Find Exactly What She Found.
She looked at this too. The last clause was honest to the point of embarrassment, which meant it was probably the right clause. She left it.
She wrote the first sentence of the first chapter.
It was not the right sentence. She knew as she wrote it that it was a sentence trying to announce itself rather than simply begin, and she drew a single line through it and wrote another.
That one was better. It placed her heroine in a ballroom, on the outside of the dancing, with a glass of ratafia she was not drinking, her face arranged into the polite attentiveness expected of unmarried women at balls.
She stopped and looked at what she had.
It was, she recognised, a version of what she expected to be next week.
The first ball Juliana had mentioned, in a house in Grosvenor Square whose owners she did not yet know, where she would know no one and the Season would be in its first machinery and she would stand at the edge of it and observe.
She was writing it before it happened. She was writing the hypothesis before the experiment.
She sat with this recognition for a moment. It did not seem, on consideration, dishonest. Hypotheses were drawn before experiments precisely because you had to know what you were testing for. If what she found contradicted her hypothesis she would revise. That was the method.
Outside, a carriage passed in the street below, its wheels loud on the cobblestones. She heard voices briefly, two men talking about the club, a name she did not catch, and then silence again, or what passed for silence in a street that had never known proper quiet.
She wrote for another half hour. The scene was rough and she knew it was rough, but the architecture of it was there.
The ballroom, the heroine, the machinery of the first evening, and the roughness would be addressed later when she knew more.
When she had the actual rooms in her mind rather than the composite room she was constructing from novels she had read and descriptions she had stored.
When the faces were specific rather than general.
She put the pen down. Blew on the last line to dry it.
Squared the sheets and placed them face-down on the corner of the writing table, under the small glass paperweight that had been on her desk at Lockwood since she was twelve and which she had packed without thinking about it, out of habit, without examining the habit.
The candle had burned down considerably. She had not noticed.
The bookshelf was still empty. She would fill it tomorrow, or not tomorrow — tomorrow they were to drive out with the children in the morning and Juliana had mentioned the park, and in the afternoon there were two calls to be made on families she had not yet met.
She would fill it when she had an hour that was fully her own, which might be the day after.
She looked at the face-down pages on the corner of the table.
It was not nothing. That was the first thing she thought. For a first evening in a new room in a city she had arrived in nine hours ago, it was enough. It was the beginning of a structure, which was all a first evening could reasonably be asked to provide.
She cupped her hand around the candle and blew it out.
The room went dark. Not the dark of Lockwood, where darkness meant real darkness, fields and sky and silence.
The London dark, with its orange tinge from below and its noise at a distance and the faint, persistent smell of the city coming in at the window she had left open an inch at the bottom.
Coal smoke and horse and the river somewhere not far enough away and something else underneath all of it that she had not yet identified and suspected would require more than nine hours.
She lay down and looked at the ceiling, which she could not quite see.
She thought, I am in London.
She thought, I do not know what is going to happen.
She had thought the second thought before, many times, and had always found it mildly disagreeable, the not-knowing, the gap in the map, the hypothesis not yet tested. She lay with it now in the London dark and found, to her moderate surprise, that it was not disagreeable at all.
The city went on below her window.