Chapter 5
His letter had come on a Tuesday.
She had been at breakfast when Mrs. Peel brought the post, and she had seen Philip’s hand on the direction before she had fully set down her cup, the careful, well-spaced script she had been reading for four years, always the same.
He wrote at the same pace regardless of what the letter contained.
She had put it in her pocket and taken it upstairs to read alone, which was not how she usually dealt with correspondence but which felt, on this occasion, correct.
Dear Miss Lockwood,
Your letter arrived this morning and I confess I read it twice before breakfast, which is not my usual practice with correspondence but which felt, on this occasion, warranted.
You are in London. I have been imagining what that sentence would look like for some months now, and I find the reality of it, the fact of you in the same city, reading the same newspapers, walking streets I might have walked that morning, produces an effect I had not entirely anticipated.
Forgive me. I am writing at greater speed than I usually permit myself, and the sentences are showing it.
I am in town as well, and have been since February, assisting a firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn with a matter that would bore you if I described it and that I therefore will not.
My lodgings in Holborn are adequate and convenient and nothing further.
The view from my desk is of a brick wall that I have come to regard with something approaching affection, which tells you more about the state of my mind these past weeks than I perhaps intend to disclose.
I have attended two lectures at the Royal Institution since arriving.
The first was on magnetic phenomena and exceeded my expectations; the second was on agricultural improvement and did not.
I found a bookseller in Paternoster Row whose catalogue suggests the possibility of a second Evelyn, inferior to the one I sent you last autumn, but of some interest regardless.
I have been saving the visit until I had sufficient reason to make it an occasion.
Which brings me to the purpose of this letter, though I suspect you have already anticipated it.
There is a lecture on Thursday next. Political economy, a Mr. Henderson, whose recent pamphlet on the relationship between capital and labour has attracted some notice in the journals.
I have read the pamphlet twice and disagree with approximately a third of it, which is precisely the proportion that makes a lecture worth attending.
I thought of you immediately when I saw the notice, which is to say I thought: she will want to argue with this.
And then I thought: I should very much like to hear her argue with it.
Would you care to attend? I enclose the particulars. Mrs. Blackwood would of course be welcome. It would be a pleasure to see her again.
I am aware that this invitation may not suit. You are newly arrived, your time will be claimed by a hundred obligations I cannot anticipate, and a lecture on political economy is perhaps not the introduction to London you had envisioned. I will understand if the engagement does not answer.
But I hope it does.
I have been corresponding with you for four years, Miss Lockwood.
I have read your thoughts on Hume and your disagreements with Mill and your observations on the inadequacy of most published prose to capture the texture of actual thinking.
I have, if I am honest, organised a not insignificant portion of my reading around the anticipation of discussing it with you.
The prospect of doing so in person rather than across the distance of a letter, I find, is something I look forward to more than anything I have anticipated in some considerable time.
Yours, with the hope of Thursday,
Philip Ashworth
She had read it twice, which was not unusual for his letters, and then had written back the same evening: yes, Thursday, she and her sister would be glad to attend.
The note was three lines. She sent it before she had finished thinking about whether to send it, which was also not unusual, though in this case she was aware of having done it.
That had been six days ago.
* * *
On Thursday morning she woke early and lay in the London dawn, the curtains already pale with light, the sky beyond them still grey and undecided, and thought about the day.
Four years of letters. She knew his mind well: the care he took with a sentence, his habit of following a thought to its end before starting another, his knowledge of trees and rare books and the philosophers he had been reading since before they began corresponding.
She knew what he found interesting and what he found insufficient.
She knew his disagreements were always polite and always genuine, which was rarer than it should have been.
She did not know what he looked like now.
She had been sixteen when he came to Lockwood with Captain Sterling, and what remained now was only an impression of him: dark hair, a quiet manner, long intervals spent in the library before the bookshelves.
Four years had passed since then, and impressions were unreliable.
She did not know his voice in conversation, or whether he spoke at the same pace he wrote, or what he did with his hands when he was thinking.
She got up.
The green wool day dress was on the wardrobe door.
She had put it there the night before without quite acknowledging she was choosing it for today, a self-deception she did not usually permit herself, and was permitting now on the grounds that it was early and the room was cold and she did not wish to stand at the wardrobe for ten minutes.
The green was Beatrice’s work and it was correct for a morning lecture and she knew it was correct and that was the whole of the reason.
She dressed. She put her hair up with more attention than usual, which she also did not examine. She went downstairs.
Juliana was already at the breakfast table with Rose on her lap and the morning post beside her cup.
Sebastian had gone out early on some business with Westbrook Colville that had been arranged for a fortnight, the two of them finally occupying the same room at the same time by the simple expedient of one of them coming to the other’s house at eight in the morning. Juliana looked up when Sophia came in.
“You look well,” she said. She said it as she said things that were true and did not require elaboration.
“I dressed carefully,” Sophia said, and poured her tea.
“I know.” Juliana shifted Rose to her other knee. “Are you nervous?”
Sophia considered this with the honesty she reserved for her sister’s questions. “No,” she said. “Anticipatory. Which is different.”
“Is it?”
“Nervous implies the possibility of a bad outcome.” She paused. “This is something else.”
Juliana looked at her for a moment, clearly observing more than she intended to comment upon, as she so often did. “I remember that feeling,” she said, and did not say anything further, which was its own form of commentary.
Rose reached for Sophia’s sleeve. Sophia gave her a finger instead, which Rose accepted and immediately attempted to bend in a direction it was not designed to go. Sophia tried, with limited success, to reclaim it.
The letter was in her pocket. She had put it there without thinking, following a habit four years old by now: his letters always ended up in the nearest pocket to hand.
She was aware of it there, the slight weight of it, the paper softened at the folds from being opened and refolded more than once.
She had not reread it this morning. She did not need to. She knew what it said.
“We should leave by ten,” Juliana said. “The address he gave is in Albemarle Street.”
“Yes.”
“It is a fair walk or a short carriage.”
“Walk,” Sophia said. “I should like to walk.”
Juliana nodded. Rose made a decisive sound and released Sophia’s finger and turned her attention to the tablecloth, and Sophia drank her tea and looked at the window and thought about four years of letters arriving on a salver and going upstairs to her desk, and about the first one, which she had read three times on the day it arrived and had been able to recall from memory for six months afterward, and about the fact that in two hours she would be in the same room as the person who had written all of them.
Significant. She was allowed to find it significant.
She put down her cup and went upstairs to find her gloves.
* * *
The lecture hall in Albemarle Street held perhaps sixty people, most of them men, arranged on benches in rows that angled toward a raised platform at the front where a lectern stood and a blackboard behind it carried three lines of chalked figures from some previous occasion that had not been fully erased.
The room smelled of chalk dust and old wood and the cold-paper smell of a space used for thinking rather than comfort.
It was not warm. Sophia approved of it immediately.
Philip Ashworth was waiting near the door.
She recognised him before she had consciously assembled the recognition, the dark hair, the contained stillness she remembered, the document case under his arm that was not the same one from four years ago but might as well have been.
He was taller than she remembered. Or she had been shorter.
Probably both. He turned when they came through the door, and for a moment the pleasure on his face arrived too quickly to be moderated before composure settled over it again.