Chapter 11 #2
Louisa was quiet for a moment. “I do not know yet,” she said.
“That is the truth. I know that I have thought about Thursday’s conversation rather more than one conversation usually warrants.
And I know that when he writes and says he has a question about the Wiltshire figures, I understand it entirely and find myself —” she stopped. “Glad,” she said. “I find myself glad.”
Sophia looked at her hands.
She waited for the sharp thing to arrive, the pull or protest that would tell her this was costing her something. She waited honestly, because she had always tried to be honest with herself even when the results were inconvenient.
It did not come.
What came instead was quieter and stranger, the faint vertigo of a future she had apparently imagined without ever consciously assembling it, now beginning to loosen at the edges.
She had not known she had been holding a picture of Philip in her future until the picture had begun to change, and now that it had she understood it had always been drawn in pencil rather than ink.
“Sophia,” Louisa said. Not a question. Simply her name, and her eyes steady on Sophia’s face.
“Write back,” Sophia said. “Tell him he may call.”
Louisa looked at her for a moment. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.” She said it without hesitation because there was no hesitation in it.
The fondness for Philip was real. The gladness that he had found something that suited him properly, or was beginning to, that part was real too.
She had not expected the gladness to come so cleanly, without the sharp thing alongside it. But there it was.
“He will still be your friend,” Louisa said. “He speaks of you —” she stopped carefully. “With great regard.”
“I know,” Sophia said. “And I of him.” She picked up her book, then set it down again. “He is exactly the kind of man you deserve, Louisa. Someone who will write down what you say and ask you to repeat it.”
Something lit Louisa’s face for a brief unguarded moment and was gone almost at once. She looked at the window and then back at Sophia and for a moment neither of them said anything.
“I did not know what you would feel,” Louisa said. “I could not tell.”
“Nor could I,” Sophia said honestly. “Until just now.”
Louisa looked at her steadily and said nothing. She did not ask what Sophia had found. She understood, Sophia thought, rather more than she was saying, and was choosing to leave it where it was.
“Wednesday?” Louisa said.
“Wednesday,” Sophia said.
She paused there for a moment with her hand on the frame, the loose pin in her hair already beginning to slip, and looked back at Sophia with the same warm directness she had shown from the first evening at the Mertons.
“Thank you,” she said.
Then she went, and the door closed, and the Clarges Street afternoon continued outside the window, and Sophia sat with the book in her lap and did not open it, and after a while the light moved off the carpet and the room went a degree cooler, and she sat in it and did not mind.
* * *
The house was quiet after Louisa left.
Juliana was upstairs with Rose and Sebastian was out, and William had been put down for the afternoon, leaving the morning room still and temporarily unclaimed, the west light falling through the window with nowhere urgent to be directed.
Sophia sat in it with her book in her lap and did not read.
She was thinking about Philip. Not with grief; she had been right about that, the grief had not come and was not coming.
But she was trying to look at things honestly because they mattered.
Four years. The letters, the rare editions, the long arguments about natural history that had been the most consistently nourishing correspondence of her life.
She was fond of him. She would always be fond of him.
The fondness was real and it was not the thing she had been waiting for.
She had not known she had been waiting for anything.
She sat with this for a while. Outside the window a carriage went past in the street, and then another, and the afternoon went on around her, and she sat in the stillness and followed the thought where it was going.
The question was not about Philip. The question, she understood, had never been about Philip.
Philip had been the answer she had offered herself when she had not been looking clearly at the question.
He matched her mind. She knew how he thought, could finish his sentences, had never once been surprised by the direction he would take in argument.
She had called this intellectual companionship, which it was.
She had called it enough, which it was not.
The thing that disrupted her certainties was not Philip.
She looked at the window.
She had been telling herself, since the dinner in April, that what she felt about Roland Colville was interest. The interest of a writer noting a subject more complicated than first assessed.
She had been very thorough about telling herself this and had not, she now understood, believed it for some time.
At the steeplechase she had said and you and the colour had risen in her face, and she had stood at the finish-line rail with the grain of the wood pressed into her palms and known, before her mind had properly consented to the knowledge, that the interest was not the kind that could be documented in a manuscript.
At the musicale he had said I was going to say unfair and responded to the precise thing she had meant rather than the broader version she might have offered anyone else, and she had looked at him and felt something for which she still did not have a name and had, ever since, been careful not to search too hard for one.
She reached for one now, sitting alone in the quiet morning room with the afternoon outside.
She was in love with him. Or she was beginning to be, which amounted to the same difficulty.
She was — she turned it over, looking at it honestly, as fairly as she could — she was in love with Roland Colville, who rode with the whole of himself, who said plain things that landed harder than philosophy, who had looked at her at a steeplechase finish line for four seconds, not at the horse or the line or anything else.
She sat with this for a moment. It was not comfortable. It was the clearest she had been about anything since she arrived in London.
Then she thought about Genevieve Ashcombe.
Fair-haired, tall, thoroughly accomplished, warm within the rules.
Standing in the Brook Street drawing room in ivory at the end of a musical evening, her hand easy at Roland’s arm.
The Ashcombe and Colville families, so close for so long.
One assumes these things find their natural conclusion eventually.
Sophia looked at the window.
She was a woman who dealt in facts. The fact was this: there was a private understanding between two families, long established, moving toward its natural conclusion.
Genevieve Ashcombe had not done anything wrong.
Roland had not done anything wrong. The world had arranged itself before Sophia arrived in it and had not consulted her about the arrangement, which was how the world operated and which she had been documenting with detached accuracy for months without understanding that she was also in it.
She was in it now.
And there was no point.
She turned this over and looked at it from every side and found it accurate each time.
There was no point in what she felt. It had nowhere to go.
It could not be acted on, could not be declared, could not be brought into a room and placed on a table and examined together.
It was simply a feeling she had arrived at too late and in the wrong direction, and the honest thing, the only honest thing, was to know it clearly and carry it without making anything of it.
She was good at carrying things without making anything of them. She had been doing it her whole life.
She opened her book.
She read the same page twice without taking in a word, and then she put the book down and looked at the ceiling and thought: well. That is the situation. And the situation is what it is.
It did not help. She had not expected it to help. She had expected it to be the truth, and it was, and she was going to have to live with it, and that was the whole of the matter.
She picked up the book again.
This time she read it.