Chapter 10 #2
He turned to look at her, a fraction of a smile passing between them, and then the bow came down and the music began and they both turned forward and the conversation was over, though what it had left behind remained.
* * *
The fourth piece was the best one. Sophia had been right to assume it without hearing it.
It ended and the room gathered itself for the final applause, people turning toward one another as the held stillness released and conversation began again with the warmth good music leaves behind.
Sophia and Roland both clapped and neither of them said anything immediately, which was its own kind of ease.
Then the door to the drawing room opened.
Sophia became aware of it through the room’s slight turning, heads coming round, the subtle rearrangement that accompanies a new arrival. Genevieve Ashcombe came in calmly, a little late, unapologetic about it, assured of being welcome.
She was in ivory, dressed without fuss, and she looked exactly right. She always did. She took in the room in a single composed glance, said something to Westbrook who was nearest the door, and then her eyes found Roland.
She crossed to him directly. Not hurrying. She knew her welcome.
“Roland.” She touched his arm lightly, a gesture that had plainly passed between them many times before. “I am so sorry. The dinner went on dreadfully. Was the Haydn good?”
“Very,” he said. He had risen when she came in, automatically and without display, exactly as he would have done for anyone entering the room. Sophia noted this with more attention than it deserved. But he was standing now and Sophia was sitting and the geometry of the previous hour had dissolved.
“Miss Lockwood.” Genevieve turned to her warmly, the greeting genuine. “How lovely. I did not know you would be here.”
“Louisa was kind enough to invite me,” Sophia said.
“She is always collecting the right people.” Genevieve said it pleasantly, as a compliment, and meant it as one.
There was nothing pointed in it. There was nothing pointed in any of it.
She was simply there, warm and lovely and at home in this house in a way Sophia was not and never quite would be, and she was talking to Roland now about the dinner she had come from and Roland was listening, absorbed.
Sophia watched it and understood what the evening actually was.
Not an intimacy she had been admitted to. An interval. A few chairs and a conversation between two pieces of music, after which the evening continued as it had always been going to continue.
She looked at her hands in her lap. The gold dress.
The good evening it had been. She had no complaints to make of any of it.
Genevieve was not unkind. Roland had not performed anything this evening that he had not meant.
The interval had been real. The fourth piece had been the best one. All of this was true at once.
Louisa appeared beside her quietly and settled into the chair Roland had left without announcement or ceremony. She was there, and that was enough.
Sophia looked at the musicians beginning to pack away their instruments. One of them was wrapping a bow carefully, the motion practised and exact.
Across the room Genevieve said something that nearly made Roland laugh outright, the sound escaping him before he checked it. Then she touched his arm again and said something low, meant only for him, and he listened with the same steady attention Sophia had come to recognise as his own.
Louisa was still beside her. Not looking at Sophia. Not offering anything.
“She is very good,” Sophia said quietly. She had said this before, at the Ashcombe tea. The words were the same. The weight of them was not.
“Yes,” Louisa said. Simply. Without adding anything.
The room had warmed with the close of the evening, coats being found, farewells beginning, the pleasant ordinary dispersal of a successful occasion.
Sophia stood and found her own coat and said good night to Westbrook, who was cordial, and to Mrs. Ashcombe’s older connexion, who had been perfectly content throughout the evening and appeared likely to remain so.
She said good night to Louisa last, at the door, and Louisa held her hand for a brief moment, quietly and without ceremony, and said nothing, which in itself meant something.
Roland was across the room with Genevieve when Sophia left. He did not see her go, or if he saw her go he did not turn. She did not look back to check.
She went out into the Brook Street night and the May air came at her cool and direct and she stood on the pavement for a moment before the Clarges Street carriage drew up, and she thought about the fourth piece being the best one, and about a man saying at least the version of me that precedes me into rooms is mine, and about the shape of an evening that had been genuinely good and had ended in the precise way it was always going to end.
The carriage door opened. She got in.
She sat beside the window with the London night moving past and let the evening remain intact in her mind, the good parts and the last part together, neither undoing the other, both true.
The house in Clarges Street appeared at the end of the street. The lamp was in the hall window.
She went inside.