Chapter 5 #2
He was, she observed, considerably better-looking than she had retained from memory.
The face had grown into itself since he was twenty, the jaw more defined now, the dark eyes steady and direct in a way that had existed before but with less confidence behind it.
He was not a man who altered the atmosphere of a room merely by entering it.
A room would fail to notice him until he said something, and then would not forget.
“Miss Lockwood.” He bowed naturally, without ceremony. Then to Juliana: “Mrs. Blackwood. Thank you for coming.”
“Mr. Ashworth,” Juliana said warmly. She had met him briefly four years ago at Lockwood, when he came with Captain Sterling on that business of her father’s, and she had liked him then, because he was quiet and serious and attentive to Sophia in a way most people were not.
“It is good to see you again. London suits you.”
Something in his face eased at the familiarity of her.
Then he turned to Sophia, and the ease became something else: a brief, direct look, steady and unguarded, the four years of letters arriving in a room rather than on paper.
She felt the slight strangeness of it. The voice she had been reading was now standing beside her with a notebook in his pocket.
“It is good to see you,” she said, and meant it more precisely than the words usually carried.
He smiled, and it reached his eyes first, softening his whole face before it touched his mouth. She had not seen his smile before. It was good.
They found seats, Juliana between Sophia and a gentleman she did not know, Philip on Sophia’s other side, where he had placed himself naturally and without discussion. He had brought his own notebook. She had brought hers. Neither of them remarked on this.
The lecturer, Mr. Henderson, arrived and arranged his papers without looking up. He was perhaps fifty, compact and slightly worn at the edges, clearly a man who had given this talk before and meant to give it well, whether the room found the subject interesting or not. Sophia liked him on sight.
The lecture began.
It was good, properly good, not softened into something more suitable for polite drawing rooms. Henderson moved through the central argument of his pamphlet with a rigour that assumed an attentive audience and did not condescend to them, and Sophia found herself following the logic with the absorption she reserved for things that actually required her attention.
Beside her she could hear Philip’s pen moving in his notebook at intervals, a quick scratch when something landed, then stillness while he listened, then another scratch.
She did not look at what he was writing.
Twice during the lecture he turned slightly toward her, not enough to draw notice, merely an unconscious adjustment; he was accustomed to thinking alongside someone else.
The first time she was watching Henderson.
The second time she turned her head fractionally and met his eye and he tilted his notebook briefly so she could read the line he had just written, which was a question about Henderson’s second premise that was the same question she had been holding for the past seven minutes.
She looked at the question. She looked back at Henderson. She wrote two words in the margin of her own notebook and tilted it back.
His pen moved again.
* * *
Afterward, in the corridor, while Juliana spoke to a woman she had recognised from somewhere and Philip and Sophia stood with their notebooks and the residue of the lecture still in the air between them, Sophia said, “His third premise does not follow from the second.”
“No,” Philip said. “Though I think he knows it. He moved past it quickly.”
“He moved past it because he cannot resolve it yet. He will in the next pamphlet.”
“I thought the same.” He looked at her with the direct, undemonstrative attention she knew from his letters. “You are exactly as I expected.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Good,” he said simply. “I had formed a very high opinion of your letters. It would have been a disappointment if the conversation had not matched them.”
She considered this. “And does it?”
“It matches them,” he said. “It is also different. Letters allow for more care. Conversation is faster.” A pause. “You think faster than you write, which I had suspected.”
“You write faster than most people think,” she said. “Which I had also suspected.”
He looked at her again, quiet and direct, nothing performed in it, and she met his gaze, and for a moment the four years of paper were simply the four years, neither too much nor too little, the ground they had been building on, and it was solid, and it was good.
Juliana appeared at her elbow. “Shall we walk? It is not raining.”
They walked. Philip fell into step beside Sophia and they talked about Henderson’s third premise, the pamphlet, and a book Philip had found in Paternoster Row that he had originally intended to send her but could now simply place in her hands instead, if she wanted it, which she did.
Juliana walked on Sophia’s other side and contributed occasionally and mostly listened, and said nothing that was not worth saying.
The street was bright after the dimness of the hall, and the air was cold enough to settle sharply on the face and hands, and Philip’s voice in conversation carried the same quality as his letters, thoughtful and willing to follow an idea all the way to its conclusion.
She had known it would. He was very much as the letters had described.
She was glad of this. Genuinely glad.
She was also aware, walking along the bright April street with his voice beside her and the cold air and the smell of coal smoke and the afternoon opening out before them, of something underneath the gladness that she could not yet name.
Not disappointment. Nothing so clear or unkind as that.
Something quieter. The feeling of arriving somewhere you have been anticipating for a long time and finding it exactly as you pictured it, which was everything you had hoped for, and which was, in some way she could not yet account for, not quite enough.
She gave Philip her full attention and walked on, and did not look at it.
* * *
Several days passed before she sat down to write the letter.
This was not deliberate. She was not avoiding it, or not consciously, but the days had been full.
London days filled themselves differently from days at home, one engagement leading directly into the next without the long uninterrupted stretches she was accustomed to, and each evening she had thought tomorrow, only for tomorrow to arrive already occupied by something else.
There had been a morning call with Juliana on Tuesday.
Wednesday she had gone to Brook Street, and she and Louisa had talked for two hours in the morning room and she had walked home along streets she was beginning to know without looking at the names.
Thursday there had been a card party she had not wanted to attend and had attended because Juliana asked her, and which had produced three observations she had been turning over since.
By Sunday evening the house was quiet. Sebastian had gone out. The children were asleep. Juliana was writing to Beatrice in the sitting room downstairs, as she did every Sunday without fail. Sophia went upstairs.
She sat at the writing table. She uncapped the ink.
She took a sheet of paper and wrote the date at the top and Dear Philip beneath it, still faintly unfamiliar after four years of Dear Mr. Ashworth.
She had changed it only two weeks ago, in the letter confirming the lecture, because after seeing him again the longer form had started to feel like a deliberate distance. Then she stopped.
She looked at what she had.
The letter should have written itself. It had a natural shape: the lecture, Henderson’s third premise, the bookseller in Paternoster Row, the book he had given her which she had now read and had thoughts about.
She had been conducting this correspondence for four years with never more than a week’s difficulty in finding the next thing to say.
She knew his mind. She knew what would interest him and what would not, what would prompt a response of two pages and what would prompt a response of six.
She could have written this letter in her sleep.
She dipped the pen. She wrote: The Henderson lecture has been on my mind since Thursday. She read this back. It was true. She wrote: His argument about the relationship between capital accumulation and… then stopped again.
She knew what she thought about Henderson.
She had known since the lecture. She had known, in fact, before Philip had tilted his notebook toward her, because she had been following the argument herself and had already arrived at the same question he had written.
Which was the problem, or part of it, though she had not yet fully formulated what the problem was.
She sat back and looked at the ceiling and thought about the afternoon: the chalk dust, the cold room, Philip’s voice considered and even, the walk afterward along the bright street.
It had been good. She had not been wrong about that.
The conversation had been exactly the conversation four years of letters had promised, and she had been glad of it, and she was glad now, sitting here with his book on the corner of the desk where she had put it after reading.