I had agreed to do a two-months stint – no longer, because from experience I knew that Belfast becomes depressing. Immediately afterwards I was to spend three days in Madrid, trying to discover if there was truth in the persistent rumour that the Pope was to visit Spain next year. ‘Great Christ alive,’ Felicity used to scream at me, ‘call this a marriage?’
In Belfast the army was doing its best to hush up a rape case. I interviewed a man called Ruairi O Baoill, whom I’d last seen drilling a gang of terrorists in the Syrian desert. ‘My dear fellow, you can hardly call this rape,’ a Major Trubstall insisted. ‘The girl was yelling her head off for it.’ But the girl had been doing no such thing; the girl was whey-faced, unable to stop crying; the girl was still in pain, she’d been rushed to hospital to have stitches. ‘Listen,’ Major Trubstall said, pushing a great crimson face into mine, ‘if a girl goes out drinking with four soldiers, d’you think she isn’t after something?’ The Red Hand of Ulster meant what it said, O Baoill told me: the hand was waiting to grasp the hammer and the sickle. He didn’t say it to his followers, and later he denied that he had said it at all.
Ruairi O Baoill is a sham, I wrote. And so, it would appear, is a man called Major TrubstalL Fantasy rules, I wrote, knowing it was the truth.
All the time in Northern Ireland and for three days in Spain Dorothea’s voice continued about Emma and Elinor and Elizabeth Bennet, and Mrs Elton and Mr Woodhouse. I kept imagining us together in a clean, empty house that appeared to be our home. Like smoke evaporating, my failed marriage wasn’t there any more. And my unhappy childhood slipped away also, as though by magic.
‘Dorothea?’
‘No, this is her mother. Please hold on. I’ll fetch her.’
I waited for so long I began to fear that this was Mrs Lysarth’s way of dealing with unwelcome telephone callers. I felt that perhaps the single word I’d spoken had been enough to convey an image of my unsuitableness, and my presumption.
‘Yes?’ Dorothea’s voice said,
‘It’s Terris. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember. Are you in Bath again?’
‘No. But at least I’ve returned from Northern Ireland. I’m in London. How are you, Dorothea?’
‘I’m very well. Are you well?’
‘Yes.’ I paused, not knowing how to put it.
‘It’s kind of you to ring, Terris.’
‘D’you think we might meet?’
‘Meet?’
‘It would be. nice to see you.’
She didn’t answer. I felt I had proposed marriage already, that it was that she was considering. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I began to say.
‘Of course we must meet. Would Thursday do? I have to be in London then.’
‘We could have lunch again.’
‘That would be lovely.’
And so it was. We sat in the bow window of an Italian restaurant in Romilly Street, and when anyone glanced in I felt inordinately proud. It was early September, a warm, clear day without a hint of autumn. Afterwards we strolled through Leicester Square and along Piccadilly. We were still in Green Park at six o’clock. ‘I love you, Terris,’ Dorothea said.
*
Her mother smiled a slanting smile at me, head a little on one side. She laid down an embroidery on a round, cane frame. She held a hand out.
‘We’ve heard so much,’ she said, still smiling, and then she introduced her sons. While we were drinking sherry Dorothea’s father appeared, a thin, tall man, with spectacles on a length of leather, dancing on a tweed waistcoat.
‘My dear fellow.’ Vaguely he smiled and held a hand out: an amateur archaeologist, though by profession a medical doctor. That I was the divorced middle-aged man whom his young daughter wished to marry was not a fact that registered in his face. Dorothea had shown me a photograph of him, dusty in a crumpled linen suit, holding between finger and thumb a piece of glazed terracotta. ‘A pleasure,’ he continued as vaguely as before. ‘A real pleasure.’
‘A pleasure to meet you, Dr Lysarth.’
‘Oh, not at all.’
‘More sherry?’ Dorothea suggested, pouring me whisky because she knew I probably needed it.
‘That’s whisky in that decanter, Dorothea,’ her brother Adam pointed out and while I was saying it didn’t matter, that whisky actually was what I preferred, her other brother, Jonathan, laughed.
‘I’m sure Mr Terris knows what he wants,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, and Dorothea said:
‘Terris is his Christian name.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’
‘You must call him Terris, Mother. You cannot address a prospective son-in-law as Mister.’
‘Please do,’ I urged, feeling a word from me was necessary.
‘Terris?’ Adam said.
‘Yes, it is an odd name.’
The brothers stood on either side of Dorothea’s chair in that flowery drawing-room. There were pale blue delphiniums in two vases on the mantelpiece, and roses and sweet-peas in little vases everywhere. The mingled scent was delicious, and the room and the flowers seemed part of the family the Lysarths were, as did the way in which Adam and Jonathan stood, protectively, by their sister.
They were twins, both still at Cambridge. They had their mother’s oval face, the pale blue eyes their parents shared, their father’s languid tallness. I was aware that however protective they might seem they were not protecting Dorothea from me: I was not an interloper, they did not resent me. But their youth made me feel even older than I was, more knocked about and less suitable than ever for the role I wished to play.
‘You’ve travelled a great deal,’ Mrs Lysarth said. ‘So Dorothea says.’
‘Yes, I have.’
I didn’t say I’d been an only child. I didn’t mention the seaside town where I’d spent my childhood, or reveal that we’d lived in a kind of disgrace really, that my father worked ignominiously in the offices of the trawling business which the family had once owned. Our name remained on the warehouses and the fish-boxes, a daily reminder that we’d slipped down in the world. I’d told Dorothea, but I didn’t really think all that would interest the other Lysarths.
‘Fascinating, to travel so,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, politely smiling.
After dinner Dr Lysarth and I were left alone in the dining-room. We drank port in a manner which suggested that had I not been present Dr Lysarth would have sat there drinking it alone. He talked about a Roman pavement, twenty feet below the surface somewhere. Quite suddenly he said:
‘Dorothea wants to marry you.’
‘We both actually –’
‘Yes, so she’s told us.’
I hesitated. I said:
‘I’m – I’m closer to your age, in a way, than to hers.’
‘Yes, you probably are. I’m glad you like her.’
‘I love her.’
‘Of course.’
‘I hope,’ I began.
‘My dear fellow, we’re delighted.’
‘I’m a correspondent, Dr Lysarth, as Dorothea, I think, has told you. I move about a bit, but for the next two years I’ll be in Scandinavia.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He pushed the decanter towards me. ‘She’s a special girl, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know, Dr Lysarth.’
‘We’re awfully fond of her. We’re a tightly bound family – well, you may have noticed. We’re very much a family.’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘But of course we’ve always known that Dorothea would one day wish to marry.’
‘I know I’m not what you must have imagined, Dr Lysarth, when you thought of Dorothea’s husband. I assure you I’m aware of that.’