CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Anne did not die, and somehow that was the thing none of them knew what to do with.
They were all of them braced for grief; they had had a fortnight's practice at it — Wren, Marsh End, Toby; they knew the shape of the sitting-round-a-table-with-untouched-bread, they had the muscles for mourning now — and instead Anne was upstairs at Fenwick, alive, in a bed, grey and hollowed and diminished, demanding a tea she was too weak to hold and being insufferable about the quality of the candles.
She had lived. She had chosen the hard door and she had lived.
And it transpired they had no practice at that at all — at the person coming back from the wall, changed, smaller, permanently lessened, and wanting not to be grieved but to be lived with.
Which is harder. She had told them it would be.
Living is the hard one. She had made all of them learn it too, now, by the simple aggravating fact of surviving.
The cost landed in pieces, across the next days, in the way real cost always lands — not in one grand blow, but in a hundred small wrong moments.
It landed when Anne reached for a book and could not hold the weight of it, her arms gone to water, thirty years of banked strength poured into a Wednesbury field and her body only now understanding what had been taken from it.
It landed when she tried to read a person — she always could, a little; the reserve had given her a kind of pressure-sense, sharper than she let on — and found the gift gone thin, found herself squinting at faces she would once have known cold, and covered it with a joke, and Elizabeth saw her cover it, and let her.
It landed the hardest at night, when she believed no one was watching, and Elizabeth came up with her tea to find her lying very still with her eyes open, taking the measure of the new smaller size of herself, learning the country of what was left.
She did not weep; Anne had done her weeping, upon a roof, weeks since; she only lay there and counted what was gone, the way she had counted at the wall, and Elizabeth set the tea down and said nothing, for there was nothing to say that was not a lie or a wound.
"It is so quiet in here now," Anne said, one night, meaning inside herself.
"Thirty years I was full to the seams and never knew it was a sound until it stopped.
There is all this room in me now. Empty rooms. I shall have to find something to put in them.
Furniture. A personality, perhaps. I am told people have those.
" "You have always had a personality." "I have always had a screen," she said.
"There is a difference. I am going to find out what is behind mine, apparently, now there is room to look.
God help everyone." She closed her eyes.
"Take the tea away; I cannot lift it and it mocks me.
And Elizabeth—" a pause "—thank you for not being kind about it.
Everyone else keeps being kind. Kitty wept.
It is exhausting. You only bring the tea and let me be a diminished horror in peace.
It is the nicest thing anyone has done for me since I stopped. "
But the person upon whom the cost landed the hardest was not Anne.
It was Mary. Elizabeth found them together upon the third day, and very nearly backed out of the room, for it was a private thing and she had done enough lurking in doorways that season to last a life; but she caught the shape of it before she went, and the shape of it stopped her.
Mary was sitting by Anne's bed — not talking, only sitting, with her plain rough wall-keeper's hands folded, keeping watch over a woman who had spent herself in the way Mary knew better than anyone how to spend — and there was a thing between them now, in the quiet, that had not been there when they were quarrelling over a map a month since.
"You did it right," Mary said, at last, low, plain.
"The stopping. Most cannot. I have read of keepers who meant to spend a share and could not find the wall in themselves to stop, and gave it all, and were gone.
You found it. You said enough and you meant it.
" A pause. "I was not certain you could.
I will tell you that plainly, since we have agreed upon plainly.
I thought you might not come back. I sat at that lantern beside Elizabeth thinking, she will not stop; no one stops.
And you stopped." "You told me where the line was," Anne said.
"That is the only reason. You told me the truth about the two doors, and where the edge sat, and so I had an edge to stop at.
Had you spared me — had you let me believe it Wren's clean morning — I should have poured it all out and been gone, and never known there was a door I could walk back through.
" She turned her head upon the pillow, grey, diminished, and looked at Mary.
"You burnt a letter that would have killed me.
Elizabeth told me. The kind lie. You wrote it and you burnt it, and because you burnt it I am lying here being a horror about the candles instead of being in the ground.
So." Mary looked at her hands. "So," she agreed, plain, unable, as ever, to take a soft thing head-on.
And then — Elizabeth watched it happen, in the quiet, in the sickroom — the thing that Lady Catherine's memory had promised and she had never quite believed would grow from so much friction: the two of them settled into one another.
Not with any grand declaration; God, no; they were both of them constitutionally incapable of it, two plain proud women who went quieter to feel the more, not louder; it happened sideways, the way real things do.
Mary said she would stay and keep watch, and Anne said that was unnecessary, and Mary said she was aware that it was unnecessary and was doing it regardless, and Anne said that in that case she supposed she could not stop her, could she, in her current diminished and pathetic state, and Mary said no, she could not, and poured the tea Anne could not lift and held the cup to her, plain, unfussy, in the way she would have tended a wall — and Anne let her.
That was the whole of it. That was the enormous thing.
Anne de Bourgh, who had spent thirty years untouched behind a screen, who flinched from tending, who had never in her life let another soul do for her what she could not do herself — let Mary Bennet hold a cup to her mouth, and drank, and did not make a joke to cover it; and Mary did not make it into a tenderness she would have to acknowledge, but only held the cup, plain as morning, and took it away when it was done.
Elizabeth got out of the doorway before either of them saw her.
Some things one does not witness; one only lets them be true.
Later Anne told her the shape of what they had decided, in the flat practical voice she kept for the things that mattered most. "Mary and I are going to write to one another," she said.
"After. When this is over, however it ends, whoever is left.
We have worked it out. She keeps a wall, and I have a map — I have still the map; that is in my head; they did not get that at Wednesbury — and between us, by post, we can watch the whole country.
Her hands, my map. What we did in one room in one dreadful night, we can do across three hundred miles, for years.
Decades, if we are spared them." She said spared, and they both felt the weight of the word in that house, and let it pass.
"So we shall write. Regularly. Whether or not the east is held.
Because the east is not the last of it — there will be a next thinning, in our lifetimes or our children's, and someone will need to have been watching, and we intend to be the two who were watching.
" "A correspondence," said Elizabeth. "A working correspondence," Anne said, with dignity.
"Do not make it sound sentimental. It is a strategic arrangement between two competent women who happen to be the only two people alive who fully understand one another, which is a purely operational inconvenience and not in any manner a—" She stopped; could not finish it; would not.
"It is letters, Elizabeth. We are going to write letters.
For the rest of our lives. Leave it there.
" "I will leave it there," said Elizabeth.
And she thought — but did not say, for Anne would have hated it — of a dead woman in Kent who had read a plain woman's letters every year for a decade and never once said they mattered, and who was, somewhere, being proven right again: that the two most useful, most alike, most impossible women in England had found one another at last, over a map and a burnt lie and a shared spending, and were going to spend the next thirty years being insufferable at one another by post, and calling it operational, and never once calling it what it was.
Which was the only friendship either of them would ever fully have.
The realest one, precisely because neither would name it.
That night she sat up with Anne while she slept — Mary having gone to snatch what rest she could before the next wall, for someone kept watch now, that was the rule, not one, never one, not even in a sickbed — and she looked at this diminished, alive, aggravating woman, and did the sum she had been avoiding.
Anne had spent a great share and lived because she had had thirty years banked to spend from.
Elizabeth had not thirty years banked; none of the rest of them had; Anne had been the reserve, and there was no second reserve.
Which meant the next great wall — and there would be a next great wall; there were eight of them left with no keeper — could not be paid the way Wednesbury had been paid, by someone who could give a fortune and still have a fortune left.
It would have to be paid by someone who gave what they had.
Which was everything. And she sat in the dark doing the arithmetic she kept doing, the one that never balanced, and arrived where she always arrived, which was her own name.
Because she was the other one who could not be stopped from paying; because when the great one came, and there was no reserve left to spend it gently, it would want someone to give what they were, the way Wren had given it, the way the keeping wants it — and she was the one who would walk toward that, told, with her eyes open, aloud, the way Anne had walked toward Wednesbury.
Except that she had not Anne's reserve to survive it.
She did not tell anyone this. Not that night.
It was not sparing — it was a thing too large to say before she was sure, and she was not sure; and some truths one assembles in private before one can bear them in public.
She had learnt that from Anne. She had learnt it from all of them.
So she sat in the dark with the sum in her lap, and watched Anne breathe — diminished, alive, having chosen — and let herself feel the one warm thing beneath the cold arithmetic: that whatever was coming for her, she would walk toward it the way Anne had.
Told. Aloud. Her own wall, saying her own enough.
And these impossible, aggravating, beloved people would hold her lantern and not say a word.
It was not much comfort, at three in the morning, with the sum in her lap.
It was the only kind this family made. She took it.