Chapter 3 #5
She went up. Sebastian followed, his hand briefly at the small of Juliana’s back as they turned the landing, and then the staircase was empty and the candles guttered in the draught from the closing door, and Sophia stood alone in the hall for a moment in her blue silk and her thin evening slippers and the cold still on her from the street.
She went up.
* * *
The blue silk took some time to remove alone.
She managed the hooks at the back by degrees, contorting her arms behind her, patient, awkward, accustomed to her own company at the end of evenings.
The silk whispered down and she hung it carefully on the wardrobe door as Beatrice would have wanted, and stood for a moment in her chemise in the cold of the room looking at it.
It had done its work. She knew it had done its work, for she had felt it in the room’s shifting attention, in the small recalculations, in the way Miss Cavendish had looked at it from across the floor.
She had not thought, putting it on in the early evening while the light was still coming through the window, that she would mind being looked at.
She had thought she would find it useful, another form of information.
A woman in a remarkable dress is received differently than a woman in an unremarkable one, and the difference itself was data.
She had not anticipated that the being-looked-at would feel like something.
She turned away from the dress and went to the writing table.
The manuscript pages were where she had left them, face-down under the paperweight. She uncapped the ink, found her place in the draft, and read back the last paragraph she had written two nights ago. The heroine at the ballroom’s edge, her glass of ratafia untouched, her face carefully composed.
She had written it before she knew what a London ballroom was.
Now she knew, and the paragraph was wrong in several specific ways.
The noise was wrong, since she had written it too orderly, too atmospheric, when the reality was a continuous roar that pressed against the skin like something solid.
The heat was wrong. The smell of it was entirely absent.
And the heroine was wrong, or not wrong exactly, but insufficient. She was performing detachment too cleanly. No real person performing detachment was ever that clean about it.
Sophia drew a line through three sentences and began again.
She wrote the ballroom correctly this time.
The heat first, then the noise, then the orange-blossom scent that had been too much of itself all evening; the chalk on the floor disappearing under two hundred pairs of feet; above it all the chandeliers, bright and absolute, making no allowances.
She wrote Miss Prewett at the refreshment table with her lemonade and her chin held up.
She wrote the girls in white muslin and the thing that happened with their shoulders and the thing that did not need to be said aloud between them because they already knew it.
She wrote well. She could feel it as the words found their shapes without effort, the scene building under her hand with the solidity of something that had actually happened rather than something being invented.
She had always been able to write. She had not known until tonight that she had been missing material.
Then she stopped.
She read back what she had written, and there was the novel’s hero at the edge of the scene, entering, the room adjusting, the figure she had not yet named because naming him would require making him specific rather than general, and she had not been ready to do that.
She was ready now.
She wrote He was called the Golden Boy of the ton, and he knew it, and the knowing had long since stopped meaning anything at all.
She looked at the sentence.
It was accurate. She had enough for it. Roland Colville moving through the room, the warmth dispensed evenly and without remainder, the face he had let fall in the brief interval between sets when he thought no one was watching. She had seen it. She had the evidence.
She wrote him in, tall, fair, the room reorganising itself around his arrival as a compass needle finds north, a man whose whole life had been arranged to produce exactly this ease.
She did not make him a villain. She did not make him stupid.
She made him what he was: a man given a role so early and so thoroughly that he had grown into it as a tree grows around a nail, the nail so deep in the wood now that neither could have told you where one ended and the other began.
She wrote He said what rooms wanted to hear, and rooms wanted to hear things that cost him nothing, and so he had spent five years saying nothing at all at considerable social profit.
She stopped again.
She read it back.
It was a good sentence. It was also, she recognised with slight and not entirely welcome clarity, a sentence sharpened by irritation.
She was, in fact, irritated. The book remark had been said and forgotten by him and was being remembered by her with a sharpness out of proportion to its weight, and she knew it was out of proportion, and knowing it did not diminish it, which was itself a piece of information she did not entirely know what to do with.
She was writing from irritation. This was new. The chapter she had drafted two nights ago had been written from a theory. This was different. It had a temperature.
She did not cross the sentence out.
She wrote two more pages. The heroine observing the hero across the ballroom.
The mechanism of the room’s response to him.
The book remark, rendered with a care that carried its own coldness, every word chosen, the scene exact, the heroine’s silence exact, and then he had forgotten her before the sentence was cold.
She wrote that and it was true and it was right and it had cost her nothing to write and this too was information.
The candle had burned considerably down by the time she stopped.
The room was very cold. She had not thought to build up the fire before she sat, and the April night had worked its way through the window frame with patience and now sat along her arms and her bare feet on the floor and the back of her neck where her braid had come loose.
She gathered the pages, squared them, placed them face-down under the paperweight.
She should not be writing about him yet. She had known him for four hours. She had exchanged perhaps thirty words with him, of which the most significant were careless and the least significant were correct. She had his outline. She had the room’s idea of him. She did not have him.
She was aware, sitting at her writing table in the cold at two in the morning with ink on her right forefinger, that this was the argument she was making to herself in order to stop, and that she had stopped anyway, which meant the argument had worked, and that it had needed to be made at all was — she looked for the word — interesting.
She put out the candle. In the sudden dark the room shifted around her, the London dark not quite dark, the low orange light of the city coming in at the window as it always did.
She sat for a moment with the cold of the floor coming up through her feet and the smell of the snuffed candle sharp in the air and thought about the three beats of a country dance figure and the warmth of a hand through a glove and the sentence: how very singular, said lightly, dropped lightly, meaning nothing.
She went to bed.
She lay in the London dark and looked at the ceiling and the sentence ran through her mind once more, and the irritation was still there, clean and exact, and underneath it something else that she did not examine, because two in the morning after a first ball was not the occasion for that kind of examination, and she was a woman who knew when to close a subject.
She closed it.
The city pressed at the glass, its noise at a distance, its light low and orange and constant.