The Marriage, Referenced

Thursday was the day the house received, which Nell had known since the third morning and had never seen tested, because in ten days nobody had come.

Somebody came on the tenth. Nell was in the hall at half past eleven with the ledger under her arm when the bell went and Perrin opened the door to a woman in a wet mantle with a card in her glove, and Sibyl was down the stairs and across the flags before the card had left the glove.

“Mrs Oldroyd. How very good of you. Her grace is not receiving today.”

“I did write.”

“You did, and she was sorry, and she is not strong in the autumn,” Sibyl said. “I shall tell her you came. Perrin, Mrs Oldroyd’s carriage.”

It took ninety seconds. The door shut. The hall got its rain-light back, and Sibyl went up the stairs with the card, and Nell turned round and found Héloïse standing in the morning-room doorway with a book in her hand, eight feet away, where she had plainly been standing for all ninety seconds of it.

She had heard herself declined, and she had heard herself described as not strong, and she had not come out.

“Your grace —“

“Not now,” Héloïse said, quite pleasantly. “At four o’clock, if you are free. Come to the library.”

· · ·Scene break

At twenty minutes to four she was in the library with the grate cold and the coal scuttle full and the box of matches in her hand, standing in front of the hearth in a way that reminded Nell of nothing so much as a woman at the top of a diving board at a bathing place.

“I want you to understand what this is,” Héloïse said, “so that you do not think it charming.”

“I’ve never once thought you charming.”

“Thank you. It is exactly four hours since Sibyl told a woman I have known for eleven years that I am not strong in the autumn, and she said it because it is true that I do not receive, and it is true that I do not receive because in my second year in this house my husband observed to eleven people at dinner that I found company tiring, and everybody agreed, including me.” She turned the matchbox over in her fingers. “I was twenty-two. I want to be accurate with you about this, Miss Hartigan, because everybody who has ever asked me about my marriage has wanted a bruise, and there is no bruise, and if you wait for one you will misunderstand the whole of it.”

“I’m not waiting for one.”

“No. You are the first.” She looked at the laid fire. “He was not a cruel man. He was a careful one. That is why it took thirteen years; a cruel man would have been over in eighteen months.”

She struck a match and it broke.

Nell put her hands in her pockets. It was the hardest professional thing she had done all week, harder than the minute she had signed on Tuesday, because every instinct she had was to cross the carpet and take the box and do it properly, and every instinct she had was the wrong one in this room.

“Rooms first,” Héloïse said, and struck another and it went out. “I had the morning room, which was mine, and my bedroom, and the drawing room after four. The library was his in the evenings and I did not sit in it because he read in here, and a person reading likes a room to himself, and he never once said so; I worked it out and then I was praised for having worked it out. The gallery was closed in the second year. I had got into a habit of walking in it at night when I could not sleep, and it was put to me that a duchess walking about the house in the dark unsettles the servants and they talk in Ambry. That was true as well.”

“Everything you’re telling me is true.”

“All of it is true. Every single rule in that book had a reason and the reason was always correct and always kind and always about somebody else’s comfort, and at the end of thirteen years I could not be in a room before four o’clock without apologising to it.” The third match took. She held it a moment and then put it to the kindling at the corner, the way she must have watched Joan do it four thousand times and never done it once. “There. That is a fire, at eighteen minutes to four, in October, laid by the mistress of the house.”

It caught and drew. The room began, without hurry, to be warm, and it was the ordinary warmth of coal, and there was nothing in it whatever except a woman with a burnt match in her hand.

“The piano,” Nell said, because she had been waiting nine days to ask it.

“Ah.” Héloïse sat down on the fender stool. “I played well. Not remarkably; well. He liked it in the first year and asked for it, and in the second year he liked it at certain hours, and in the third he asked me to play for nine people after dinner, and I went wrong in a passage I had played since I was fourteen. And he was kind about it. In front of the nine people, at some length, about how I was not to mind and how music was a great strain on me.” Her mouth moved. “I have thought about that evening more often than I have thought about his funeral. I have never put the lid up since. Hensley comes twice a year and tunes it and says nothing, and I pay him and I think: there. That, at least, is honest money.”

“And the letters?”

“You may as well have that too.” She was watching the fire. “There is a woman I have known since I was fifteen, who wrote to me four times in two years, and who I believed had simply let it drop, as people do. I found out nine months ago that she had been answered every time. Her grace regrets that she is not at present strong enough to receive. In his hand, and then in Sibyl’s hand, because Sibyl learned the house the same way I did and she learned it from him, and she is doing it downstairs at half past eleven in the morning and she thinks it is love. It is love. That is what nobody outside a house like this can ever be made to see.”

Nell stood by the mantelpiece with her arms folded and did not say any of the six things that came up in her, because five of them were about Sibyl and the sixth was not sayable.

“Why did you bury it?” she said instead. “The rest of it I can see from here. Not that.”

· · ·Scene break

“Because of the examination,” Héloïse said. “I was eleven.”

She had her hands round her knee. The firelight was on the side of her face and the rest of the room was going grey behind her, and Nell stayed where she was.

“It was the ordinary thing they did with girls of my rank, and my mother’s whole family had a horror of it, because there had never been any in her line and she considered it a coarseness, like red hair. A man came from Bath with a case of instruments. He had a glass not unlike yours.”

“And?”

“And it moved.” She said it evenly. “It swung out and it kept time, and I saw it do it, and he saw it do it, and he said — very gently, in the voice one uses to a child who has got something on her dress — now, my dear, have you ever made anything happen that you did not touch?

“And I said no.

“I was eleven years old and I had never lied to a grown man in my life, and I heard my own voice say no, and he watched me say it and he wrote nothing down. Nothing. He put the glass away. He went down and told my mother that there was no finding, and at dinner she told my father with a great deal of relief, and she said, thank God, because it would have been so very difficult to place her — and I sat at that table and ate my soup and understood precisely what the correct answer had been, and I had already given it.”

The fire moved.

“Twenty-four years ago,” Héloïse said. “I have not told one person that. By the time I married I had put it so far down that I did not have to think about it any more, which is what putting a thing down is for. And then thirteen years of not being strong in the autumn on top of it. And by the time he died, Miss Hartigan, when a door began to shut itself in front of a woman I did not want to speak to, I did not think that is me. I thought this house is haunted, with my whole heart, for about four days, and those were four of the more restful days of my adult life.”

“He never knew,” Nell said.

“He never knew. I want that said plainly, because you have been generous to me and I will not let you make him worse than he was. He did not take it out of me. It was hidden before I ever met him and he simply built a house round the hiding place.” She stood up. “Which brings us to the study.”

· · ·Scene break

They went up the east corridor at ten past four with the light going.

Héloïse walked ahead. Nell came behind with the ledger and her mouth shut, and she was aware, the whole length of that corridor, of the cold that had followed her for nine nights — ankles first, then up under the cuffs — and of the fact that it was not there.

At the last door Héloïse stopped.

She did not put her hand on the handle. She stood in front of it with her arms at her sides, and Nell watched the back of her neck and her shoulders and her right hand, and the hand was open.

“Eighteen months ago I stood here,” she said, “and I thought that I never wanted to go into that room again as long as I lived, and I was believed.”

She said the next part to the door.

“I should like to go in now.”

The lock turned.

It was not dramatic. It was the sound a lock makes, exactly, and then the small give of a door coming off its keeper, and it swung an inch on eighteen months of settled dust and stopped.

Héloïse did not move for four or five seconds. Then she pushed it with the flat of her hand and went in.

· · ·Scene break

It was cold and it was nothing.

That was the thing Nell was least prepared for. A desk, a chair with a dent in the leather, estate ledgers in a row, a decanter with an inch in the bottom gone thick, a fireplace full of last winter’s ash from the winter before. Dust on everything, an even grey coat of it, undisturbed as the salt on the landing had been.

Nell put two fingers on the door frame out of habit and got beeswax, and a man’s hand on the same place ten thousand times, and nothing else at all. No mark. No drag.

“There is nothing here,” Héloïse said. She sounded as though somebody had taken something off her that she had been carrying.

“No.”

“I have been eighteen months being afraid of a room with a decanter in it.”

She went round the desk and opened the wide drawer, and stood looking into it, and then lifted out a letter-book — a big one, half-bound, the sort with tissue leaves for pressing copies — and set it on the blotter and turned it over on its face without opening it.

“That will be the regrets,” she said. “I am not going to read them today.”

Then she opened the cupboard under the north window.

Nell was on the other side of the room and she heard her stop breathing.

It was music. Eight or nine volumes of it, bound, the corners rubbed, and a portfolio tied with tape, and on the flyleaf of the top one a round, careful, girl’s hand with her own name in it, and a date, and the pencil fingering somebody had written in for her over the first four bars.

“This was in the drawing room,” Héloïse said. “In the bench. Until it was not, and I was told it had been put away safely, and I did not ask where, because by then I did not ask where.”

She stood with the top volume in both hands for a while. Nell counted the seconds by the light going off the window and did not say one word, and did not go over, and it cost her.

Then Héloïse put the rest of the volumes under her arm, and left the letter-book face down on the blotter, and left the decanter and the ledgers and the chair with the dent in it, and walked out of the room and pulled the door shut behind her, and it shut the way a door shuts.

In the corridor she stopped.

“Miss Hartigan.” Then: “No. Nell.”

“Your grace.”

“Tonight, when Sibyl has gone up.” She had the music held against her like something warm. “Kettleby. The whole of it, and not the way you told it in the still-room. You gave me the facts and I have been living on the facts for a week, and it will not do, because I am about to ask you to do something for me on the fourteenth day, and I find I cannot ask it of a woman who has only given me the facts.”