Chapter 5 #3
She was also aware, and this was the thing she had been circling for four days, that throughout the lecture she had known what he was going to say.
Not in the sense of predicting the words.
In the deeper sense: she had known the shape of his thinking before it arrived.
She had known which parts of Henderson he would find compelling and which he would find incomplete, and she had been right, and there had been a moment during the walk home when she had heard herself finishing his sentence, not aloud but in her mind, a beat before he said it, and had understood, with the discomfort of accurate self-knowledge, that this was not a new thing.
She had been doing it in the letters for a year. Perhaps longer.
Philip was not less than she had thought him.
He was exactly what she had thought him, and that was the difficulty.
She had thought him through so completely over four years that by the end of the afternoon she already possessed a full account of him.
The account was admirable, and the man himself was admirable, and she felt for him what she had always felt: respect, warmth, the quiet ease of encountering a mind that moved along lines familiar to her own.
Yet she had come away with the uneasy sense that there was nothing left to discover, and at twenty years old she did not know what to do with that.
She looked at the half-written letter. She looked at The Henderson lecture has been on my mind since Thursday and at His argument about the relationship between capital accumulation and suspended mid-sentence on the page.
She put the pen down.
Not with any decision. She found, when she looked at the sentence, that she had nothing to add to it tonight.
It could wait. He was not waiting for it urgently.
They had agreed to attend another lecture the following week, and she would see him there, and the letter could follow the lecture rather than precede it.
She pushed the half-written sheet aside.
For a moment she simply sat. The candle burned. The house was quiet below her. The occasional creak of Juliana’s chair in the sitting room, the distant sounds of the street, the low orange tinge of the London night coming in at the window’s edge.
Then, without having decided to, she reached for the manuscript.
She had not opened it since the night after the ball.
She had thought about it, had thought about the chapter she needed to write, the scene she had been carrying since Grosvenor Square, the one with the book remark and the three beats of the country dance.
She had not written it because she had not found the right distance from it.
Now she uncapped the ink again and turned to the last page she had written and read it back.
It was good. She had forgotten how good it was, the ballroom rendered with all its real heat and noise, the machinery of it visible in every detail. She turned to a fresh page.
She wrote the dance.
She wrote it from memory, which was unusual for her.
Normally she worked from notes, from accumulated observation, building a scene carefully piece by piece until the whole structure held.
This came differently. The warmth of the hand through the glove.
The three beats, and the slight solidity of him close at hand.
The grey eyes on her face, briefly, before the figure carried them apart.
She wrote the transition back to the chairs, the reticule in her lap, the clasp fastened now.
She wrote Louisa beside her and what Louisa had said, and the candles above them burning on without concern for any of it, and the feeling she had not examined that night.
She was not examining it now either. She was writing, which was different.
She wrote for an hour. When she stopped it was because the scene had ended, not because she had run out, and she put the pen down and looked at what she had with the slightly winded feeling of work that had gone well without entirely accounting for itself.
Six pages. The best six pages she had written since she began.
She turned them face down under the paperweight.
She looked at the half-written letter to Philip, still pushed to the corner of the table.
She looked at the manuscript.
She did not look at what the juxtaposition meant. She was, she decided, too tired for that level of self-examination, and it was late, and tomorrow was Monday, and on Monday she was meeting Louisa at Brook Street, and that was quite sufficient for a Sunday night.
She put out the candle.
In the dark she could still smell the ink, fresh on the pages under the paperweight, and outside the London night pressed its orange light against the glass, and somewhere in the street below a carriage passed, its wheels on the cobblestones loud and then receding, and she lay in the dark for a while not thinking about anything in particular, which was, she recognised, not quite the same as not thinking about it.
She went to sleep.