‘We can sell the house at last.’
She hears James passing this information on and looks to see the vagueness it inspires in Michingthorpe’s plump features, as happens when something utterly without interest requires his attention.
‘We’ve found an oast-house,’ she says herself.
There is a different reaction now. For the first time in Clione’s entire acquaintance with him, Michingthorpe allows his mouth to open in what appears to be shock. Nor does it close. His small eyes stare harshly at the air. He sits completely still, one hand grasping the other, both pressed into his chest.
‘This is the country?’
‘Well, yes. Sussex.’
There is a pause, and then recovery. Michingthorpe stands up. ‘Originally my family came from Sussex. But a long time ago. Michingthorpe Ales.’
‘We shall miss you.’ Clione notices herself sounding as mischievous as one of her children. There is no protestation that they’ll be missed themselves. For a long moment their empty-handed visitor is silent. But before he goes there’s more about the Internet.
Pouring coffee at breakfast five days later, Clione waits to hear the content of an early-morning telephone calclass="underline" only Michingthorpe gets in touch at five to eight. It has occasionally been earlier.
‘He has been to see it.’
‘What? Seen what?’
‘The oast-house. He’s been down there. Well, he was near, I think. Anyway, he has looked it over.’
‘But why on earth?’
‘It’s decidedly unlike him, but even so he has. I think I told him where it was. Not that he asked.’
‘You mean, he went along and bothered those people for no reason?’
‘He just said he’d looked it over.’
A flicker of unease disturbs Clione. It might have amused her if ever she had confessed that Michingthorpe has feelings for her; but to have confessed as well that he has never displayed them, that her woman’s intuition comes in here, would have led too easily on to a territory of embarrassment. Could it all not be imagination on her part? Or put more cruelly, a fading beauty’s yearning for attention? ‘Oh, but surely,’ Clione has heard James’s objection, the amusement all his now. Better just to leave it, she has always considered.
‘He knows our offer has been accepted?’
‘Oh, yes, he knows.’
Two days later, in the early afternoon, they visit again the house they have bought, received there by an elderly man – a Mr Witheridge whom they have not met before, whose daughter and son-in-law showed them around. They are permitted to take measurements, and in whispers speak of structural changes they hope to make.
‘Nice that your friend liked it too,’ the old man says, waiting downstairs with teacups on a tray when they have finished.
Profuse apologies are offered, and explanations that sound lame. Some silly muddle, James vaguely mutters.
‘Oh, good heavens, no! Oast-houses are in Mr Michingthorpe’s family, it seems. Michingthorpe Ales, he mentioned.’
The garden is little more than a field with a few shrubs in it. The present occupants came in 1961; Mr Witheridge moved in when his wife died. All this is talked about over cups of tea, and how mahonias do well, and winter heathers. But there are no heathers, of any season, that Clione and James can see, and herbs have failed in brick-edged beds in the cobbled yard.
‘Martins nest every year but they aren’t a nuisance,’ the old man assures them. ‘I’d stay here for ever, actually.’ He nods, then shrugs away his wish. ‘But we need to be nearer to things. Not that we’re entirely cut off. No, I don’t want to go at all.’
‘We’re sorry to take it from you.’ James smiles, again apologetic.
‘Oh, good heavens, no! It’s just that it’s a happy place and we want you to be happy here, too. There’s a bus that goes by regularly at the bottom of the lane. I explained that to your friend when he said he didn’t drive.’
‘Yes, I dare say he’ll visit us.’ Clione laughs, but doubts – and notices James doubting it too – that Michingthorpe often will, not being the country kind. The long acquaintanceship seems already over, the geography of their lives no longer able to contain it.
‘Your friend was interested in the outhouses.’
‘You’re intending to live with us?’ Clione stares into the puffy features, but the slaty eyes are blank, as everything else is. His voice is no more lifeless than it usually is when he explains that he happened to be in the neighbourhood of the oast-house, a library he had to look over at Nettleton Court.
‘Not fifteen minutes away. Nothing of interest. A wasted journey, I said to myself, and that I hate.’
‘You mentioned converting the outhouses to that old man.’
‘I have a minikin’s lifestyle. I like a certain smallness, I like things tidy around me. I throw things out, I do not keep possessions by me. That’s always been my way, I’ve been quite noted for it.’
‘We’ve no intention of converting the outhouses.’
Michingthorpe does not respond. He takes his spectacles off and looks at them, holding them far away. He puts them on again and says:
‘What d’you think I got for the Madox Ford? Remember the Madox Ford?’
‘We’ve never talked about your living with us.’
It is impossible to know if this is acknowledged, if there is a slight gesture of the head. Michingthorpe Ales were brewed at Maresfield, Clione learns, but that was long ago. In the 1730s, then for a generation or two.
‘I never took much interest. Just chance that I stumbled across the family name. In Locke’s Provincial Byeways, I believe it was.’
‘We’ll move down there in May.’
Quite badly foxed, the Ford, the frontispiece gone. ‘Well, you saw yourself. Six five, would you have thought it?’
Later, Clione passes all that on. The faint unease she experienced when she heard that Michingthorpe had been to Sussex is greater now. For more than twenty years he has had the freedom of a household, been given the hospitality a cat which does not belong to it is given, or birds that come to a window-sill. Has he seen all this as something else? It seems to Clione that it must be so, that what appears to her children and her husband to have come out of the blue is a projection of what was there already. Michingthorpe’s clumsy presumption is the presumption of an innocent, which is what his unawareness makes him. She should say that, but finds she cannot.
She listens to family laughter and when the children are no longer there says she is to blame, that she should have anticipated that something like this would one day happen.
‘Of course you’re not to blame.’
‘It was my fault that he presumed so.’
‘I don’t see how.’
She tells because at last she has to, because what didn’t matter matters now. A misunderstanding, she calls it. She knew and she just left it there, permitting it.
‘Oh, but surely this can’t be so? Surely not?’
‘I’ve always thought of it as harmless.’
‘You couldn’t have imagined it?’
She does not let a stab of anger show. Her husband is smiling at her, standing by the windows of the sitting-room they soon will leave for ever. His smile is kind. He is not mocking or being a tease.
‘No, I haven’t imagined it.’
‘Poor bloody fool!’
‘Yes.’
She does not confess that after her recent conversation with Michingthorpe she felt sorry she’d been cold, that bewilderingly she dreamed these last few nights of his shadow thrown on snow that had fallen in the oast-house garden, his shadow on sunlit grass, an imprecise reflection in a pool on the cobbles where the outhouses were. His fleshy palms were warmed by a coffee mug while his talk went on, while she beat up a soufflé, while again he recalled the dressmaker who had made him rock buns.
‘It’s horrid,’ she says. ‘Dropping someone.’