The children are visitors themselves now, coming back to the house when they are ill or unhappy in a love affair, though often leaving again without mentioning anything; or coming back because they are, all three, affectionately disposed towards both their mother and their father. Their mother’s fifty-first birthday draws them for Sunday lunch one damp February weekend, the last time it will be celebrated in this house, for after nearly twenty-five years there is to be a move. ‘We rattle about like two ageing peas,’ Clione has said, ‘now that you have left us on our own.’ Two days ago an offer was made for a converted oast-house in Sussex. Tomorrow it will be known if it has been accepted.
Clione has privately resolved that if it isn’t she’ll somehow find the extra and pay the asking price. Her childhood was passed in the country, and already she has wondered about keeping a dog – a spaniel – as once she did. Time has been on her hands since her children’s going; she wants to grow her own vegetables again, to have asparagus beds, to cosset anemones and clematis and hellebores. Some intuition tells her she’ll delight in that.
This prospect cheers Clione after her children have left, all together in the late afternoon, and the house in which all of them were born has gone quiet again. She wears a dress she bought specially for her birthday lunch, two shades of green, a silk scarf with an ivy pattern at her throat. Her presents clutter the sitting-room and there are torn cardboard packages on the floor, four different kinds of shiny coloured paper waiting to be folded: at Christmas it can be used again. Her cards are on the mantelpiece. A Rösel pepper-grinder is on the hearthrug beside her where she kneels, her new yellow coffee-maker on the armchair she usually sits in, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony on disc beside it. The glow of smokeless fuel throws back a little heat at her.
Clione misses her children. It is missing them that drew her to the oast-house, to thoughts of vegetables and plants. And the chances are that her children will be drawn to it too, that they’ll come there more often than to the house in London, that they’ll delight in the summer countryside and weekend walks about the lanes, in winter bleakness, the trees skeletal, brown empty hedges. She longs for her children sometimes, wanting to set the time back to when there were children’s worries, so very easy to comfort, to when her children gave her what a husband can’t, not even the most generous. That a child was stillborn is never spoken of by James or by herself; their living children do not know.
She pushes away a surge of melancholy and thinks again about the changing seasons in a garden that does not yet quite exist, about fitting in all the paraphernalia of the Asterisk Press in the upstairs rooms. No longer kneeling, she leans back against the seat of an armchair, her legs slipped more comfortably to one side. Her eyelids droop.
There is something about Michingthorpe’s way of ringing a doorbell that indicates, in this house at least, who it is: a single short ring, shorter than most people’s and never repeated. Michingthorpe knows the sound can be heard in all the rooms, that if the summons is not answered no one is in, even though some lights are on.
Her doze disturbed, Clione imagines him already in the room and bearing, as her children have, a brightly wrapped gift. The unlikely, sleepy fantasy goes on a little longer. She sees herself in gratitude embracing Michingthorpe – which she has never done – and hears her voice exclaiming over what their visitor has brought.
Dusk is giving way to darkness. She shovels more coal on to the fire, then pulls the curtains over all three windows. The hall door bangs downstairs. Minutes later, in his long black overcoat, Michingthorpe is giftless in the sitting-room doorway.
‘I knew of course that it was there.’ He speaks to the air, as he always does, addressing no one. ‘The funeral two months ago, disposal of the library on the eighth. They’d no idea. All that stuff and they’d no idea. I had the pickings to myself.’
He doesn’t take his overcoat off. He has a way of sometimes not doing that. He sits down, still talking, saying he spent the night before in the temperance hotel of the town he visited, the only hotel there was. He and a local bookseller were the only dealers, and all the bookseller wanted was the Hardy. Sluggish on the sofa, Michingthorpe polishes his glasses and carefully replaces them as he speaks.
‘Frightful journey. Change twice and a tree down on the line at Immington. Of course I had the Grossmith stuff to annotate.’
Pouring drinks, James nods. His fair hair has gone non-descript and is receding; in fawn corduroy trousers, checked winter shirt, fawn pullover, he is a little stooped.
‘Clione’s birthday,’ he says, offering Michingthorpe a Kir.
But nothing that is outside himself, or part of other people, ever influences Michingthorpe. His surface runs deep, for greater knowledge of him offers nothing more than what initially it presents. Roaming the Internet is his hobby, he sometimes says.
Still feeling a little woozy from the wine at lunchtime, Clione shakes her head at the offer of a drink and tidies the room instead. Michingthorpe says he has formed the opinion that Conrad conducted a correspondence with a woman called Rosa Hoogwerf.
‘Then residing in Argentina, though why remains a mystery. I’ve floated the name on the Net.’
Clione wonders if he noticed that she has carried a yellow coffee-maker across the room, or registers that she is now gathering up the remains of cardboard packages from the floor. She clears away the birthday cards from the mantelpiece.
‘Some woman in Hungary,’ Michingthorpe is saying. ‘By the sound of her, Rosa Hoogwerf’s granddaughter.’
He has accepted the drink that has been poured for him, and Clione wonders why he is here, then realizes it is to tell about the journey he has made and the prize that has come his way. Someone who once visited his flat saw the refrigerator open, with only a single bottle of milk in it, and uncooked sausages on a plate and butter still in its foil. Michingthorpe is unmarried, has apparently never had with anyone – man or woman – what could be called a relationship. That is generally assumed, but assumed with confidence, and is not contradicted by the known facts.
Clione sits down again. The conversation dims to a grey murmur she doesn’t listen to. She doesn’t dislike Michingthorpe, she never has; he isn’t an enemy of any kind. Sometimes she considers he isn’t even a bore, simply a presence with small slate eyes and teenager’s hair that has a biblical look. She isn’t aware of how she knows he loves her.
‘Not that I feel my age,’ she suddenly hears now, and wonders if he has finally acknowledged that there has been a birthday in the house and has said when his is, in August, as he has said before. ‘Miskolc is where that woman is. She has a little English.’
He has never, that Clione can remember, met her eye, for he doesn’t go in for that with anyone; yet still she knows. For several years – and before, for she senses that it has been longer – there has been something that even now seems extraordinary: it is incredible that Michingthorpe can love anyone; incredible too that he can be mysterious. Burning the cardboard she has collected, continuing not to listen to what is said, she wonders yet again if he is aware that she senses his attachment.