‘You would give up your flat?’
‘Some arrangement could be made. I don’t know what.’
In the night Mrs. Iveson resolved that if the girls who came weren’t right she would make her offer. She lay awake for hours, wondering if all grandmothers felt as she did, if in similar circumstances they experienced, irresistibly, the urge to have some place in a grandchild’s life. Letitia’s compassion hadn’t always been easy to tolerate, yet in the night it felt like cruelty that others had benefited from it and her baby would not. Twice — while Mrs. Iveson sighed inwardly with impatience — Letitia had paid an old alcoholic’s fare back to County Mayo. And there was Kevin with his unnecessary stick, and the one who said he was a cardinal and gave a name, and Miss Cartwell invited into the flat one hot Saturday morning, bringing with her a stench of such pungency that scented sprays and the windows wide open did not succeed in sweetening the air. ‘But what can you expect,’ Letitia had asked with irritating reason, ‘since she has been sleeping in those clothes for more than fifteen years?’ Miss Cartwell still daily passes by, on her way to the St. Vincent de Paul place. The one who believes himself to be a cardinal began an awful wailing when he was told Letitia was no longer alive, and later asked for a photograph.
The urge that made her give to the dispossessed would have nourished Letitia’s motherhood. Steadfast in her loyalty to her husband, she would have brought her child up to respect a father simply because that was what he was. Bereavement drags the truth out, Mrs. Iveson wrote ten days ago to a longtime friend in Sussex. Letitia’s innocence seems just a little remarkable now, and I wonder if the good are always innocent.
‘We could advertise again,’ Thaddeus suggests. ‘Sooner or later a perfectly suitable girl could easily walk in.’
‘I rather doubt it.’
Across the room — he standing by the open french windows, she by the fire-place — Mrs. Iveson’s glance fails to match the composure of her tone. It is the glance of a mother who for a long time will not cease to mourn; it is at odds with the summer coolness of her clothes, the necklace of pearls and unobtrusive earrings. Businesslike, her statements pack away emotion, leaving it only in her eyes. She has never thought to leave her flat, but once upon a time she thought Letitia would never leave it either. And Letitia did so permanently; she does not intend that.
Yet even after she made her resolution in the night Mrs. Iveson hesitated all over again. No one can predict what living at close quarters with a man who has married your daughter for her money will be like. There’s an elusiveness about Thaddeus that defies prediction, that did so when first he came into their lives, a stranger on a train on a Saturday afternoon, when they were returning from another visit to Bath. He talked more easily on that occasion than she has ever known since, saying he had been to see an elderly relative whom he hardly knew, who was unwell, and in what seemed an artless way confessing he had expectations from that direction. They listened to revelations about this ailing relative on his father’s side, and about the house he had years ago inherited and how he made his living. They told him, when he asked, about themselves.
The landscape still changes for Mrs. Iveson on that journey, the backs of houses coming when there is a town, then bright green hills again. It was April then, their first leaves decorating ash and beech. He always went on journeys of more than a certain length by train, the man who talked to them divulged, not trusting an aged car; not that, in fact, he travelled much. His voice was educated, pleasant to listen to; the encounter passed the time. But though he appeared to be quite open, she knew he wasn’t. Long afterwards, when the friendship with Letitia had begun, she did not ever quite say that he was shoddy goods. Letitia said it for her, actually using the expression that had been withheld. ‘You think so, don’t you?’ And unconvincingly Mrs. Iveson denied it.
‘Having seen these girls today, I can assure you I would be happier with this.’ She would be seventy when she returned to her flat, Georgina no longer in need of her care. But it should not be beyond her to pick up whatever threads remained. ‘You understand, Thaddeus?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Thaddeus looks out, over lawns and flower-beds, at the summer-house in the distance, at the little orchard of plum trees behind it, the birch trees beyond. He might still say no. He might insist, not just suggest, that they should try with another advertisement. Or he might somehow wriggle out of what appears to have already come about. He would have, with Letitia; he would have managed something. But it is his mother-in-law who speaks next.
‘Well, we cannot keep this last one waiting. In fairness, we must send her on her way.’
While speaking, she moves towards the door, taking from beneath a candlestick on the mantelpiece the last of the ten-pound notes Thaddeus earlier placed there to ensure that the girls who came weren’t out of pocket after their journey. Letitia’s money, Mrs. Iveson can’t help thinking, and wants to ask, as often she has wanted to in the weeks that have passed, ‘Why did you let her cycle about the lanes?’ But in fairness such a question cannot be put and she does not do so.
‘Say I’m sorry,’ Thaddeus requests, watching her leave the room, her back held so straight that she might only yesterday have had her last deportment lesson. His own mother did not hold herself so well when she aged. Wrapped in her damson-coloured dressing-gown, shabby at the edges, she was restless sometimes in this room, happier when she walked about the garden with the husband she lived her life for. In winter they sat and watched the rain or played chess by the fire, their two bent heads reflected in the looking-glass that stretches the length of the mantelpiece. Reflected still are the spines of books on old teak shelves, The Essays of Elia and Eliana Lamb embossed and tooled, F. L. Hall’s History of the Indian Empire, the Reverend W R. Trace’s Portrait of a Clergyman, being Anecdotes and Reminiscences, Daudier’s Fly Fishing, Great Scenes from the Courts, A Century of Horror Tales. All of Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë is there, all of George Eliot and the Waverley novels, Sir Percy Keane’s Diary of an Edwardian Hell-Raiser, all of Thackeray and Dickens. The romantic works of Mrs. Audrey Stone and Marietta Kay Templeton are there in their cheaper editions, and Murder in Mock Street and The Mystery of the Milestone and The Casebook of Philippe Plurot.
‘We must not sell the things,’ his mother said the day his father died, when Thaddeus was thirteen. They never did. Paintings and furniture continued to be a reminder of the Davenants’ heyday: the drawing-room landscapes in tarnished frames, the Egyptian rugs on the wide boards of the floor, the rosewood sofa-table, the white marble of the mantelpiece, Georgian coins. Rigby, Charing Cross, the engraving on the carriage clock beneath a glass dome recorded. He would go on being sent away to school, his mother said the day his father died: arrangements had been made for that. Not selling the things, going away to schooclass="underline" all of it was part of something, and the penury must be borne.
‘We’ve talked it over,’ comes Mrs. Iveson’s voice from the hall, and then there is the opening of the hall door, a rasping sound that is particular to it. When his mother died Father Rzadiewicz stayed overnight, and pointed about him at the possessions that had been kept and said that really it was ridiculous not to sell them. Thaddeus agreed, but still did not do so. Instead, as his mother had, he sold the apples and the gooseberries, the pears and plums. He cultivated parsley beds and went in for other herbs, for asparagus and new potatoes, Belle de Fontenay. It was then that he teased back to health the vine in the conservatory. For all his years alone, other people did not come to the house, as they hadn’t before: solitude was what he knew and did not fear. ‘Yet you have married me in order to be rescued from it,’ Letitia pointed out, preferring to believe that.