Mrs Tait arrived first. She had put on the hat with cherries and brought the neighbour who had paid through her, a quiet woman with a yellow scarf tucked into her coat. She introduced her as Mrs Lucy Neale. They stood on the step looking past me at the light.
“Are we too early?”
“Not at all.”
I took their coats. For weeks I had pictured that moment, strangers arriving at a room I had made ready because they wanted something I had invited them to share. Now they were here. The pleasure came in spite of everything. I hung the coats carefully, one over the other, and took them in.
Minnie followed with her friend. She touched the red ribbon on my hat, which I had taken off and set beside the door, and winked. I was so grateful that she did not ask how I felt that I kissed her more warmly than I intended.
Joan Hesketh came at seven carrying the books. She looked at the room, nodded to me and asked where she could leave her bag. I showed her the little back sitting room. Bessie had put water there and a clean towel, without being told to make any fuss.
“It’s a good light,” Mrs Hesketh said when she returned.
I did not tell her it was borrowed.
At twenty past seven two women came without subscriptions. They had seen the notice at Mrs Norridge’s shop and wished to try an evening before paying for more. Dora took their money at the door, then went to sit beside Miss Holt. Bessie was in the kitchen, Arthur had moved the last chairs before leaving with Nell, and I could stand at the front without anyone waiting for me to fetch something.
There were nineteen listeners. I counted them once from the doorway, then made myself stop.
Mrs Wetherby had come without Edith, who was visiting a friend. She took the seat near the aisle so she could stretch one leg. Grace sat by the window with her hands folded, not drawing anyone. Ruth was there for the first of her two evenings; her gloves lay neatly on her lap. She had written her mother again, she told me, and got a reply which asked more about the music than the politics.
At half-past seven I stood beside the table.
“Good evening.”
The room settled. Not instantly; a chair moved, a handbag shut, someone coughed. I waited until I could hear the little sound the lamp made. The first sentence of the introduction lay in my hand, and after it the second, each rehearsed enough that I did not need to clutch them.
I welcomed them to the house. I said Joan Hesketh would begin with a novel about a woman whose family had grown accustomed to her usefulness. There was a small movement among the listeners, a smile here and there. I gave the title and stepped away.
No one applauded me. They were waiting for the speaker. I sat at the end of the first row with one of Mrs Hesketh’s spare copies open on my knees.
Mrs Hesketh began with Anne Elliot and the people who required her company without much caring what she had to say. Then she asked whom we had enjoyed most.
“Her father,” Grace said. “I should hate to draw him. He’d keep improving the picture while my back was turned.”
Mrs Tait laughed. She liked Mary, she said, not because she would want to visit her but because nobody else in the family could get such a quantity of unhappiness out of a perfectly ordinary afternoon.
“I know someone like that,” Dora said.
“Don’t name her,” Mrs Wetherby advised. “We may all be visiting.”
The room warmed. Mrs Hesketh let the talk run for a little, then asked whether we always knew whom we were laughing at.
Minnie opened her book.
“I promised Mrs Bellamy an argument about that.”
She had put a piece of red paper at Mrs Musgrove’s conversation with Captain Wentworth. The lost son, the mother’s fond reconstruction of him, the account of her grief. Minnie read a short portion, stopped, and touched the line.
“Large fat sighings,” she said. “Why fat?”
No one answered at once. Mrs Tait shifted in her chair. I remembered Minnie pressing her saucer in the tea shop and wished, too late, that I had asked more about the son who wrote so seldom.
“It’s an absurd picture,” Mrs Wetherby said. “A mother remembering qualities nobody else remembers.”
“I grant you absurd. I asked about fat.”
“Would you mind if she were thin?”
“I’d mind that too, if it were offered as a reason not to believe her.”
Miss Holt bent over the page. “Does it mean we don’t believe her? Or that we needn’t believe what she says about the boy?”
“Can’t she be wrong about him and still miss him?” Minnie asked.
“Certainly,” Mrs Hesketh said. “Where does the passage leave room for that?”
Minnie looked up, suspicious for a moment. She had come ready to defend a woman, not to find the defence inside the book she was accusing. Then she went back to the page.
“He listens kindly,” she said at last. “Captain Wentworth.”
“Though he knows better,” Mrs Wetherby added.
“Though he knows something else,” Minnie said. “That isn’t necessarily better.”
Ruth smiled at that and looked down when Mrs Wetherby saw her. Mrs Hesketh asked the older woman whether the mother’s recollection had ever happened in her classroom.
“Frequently. Children acquire extraordinary qualities once they have left your charge.”
“Did their mothers invent them?”
Mrs Wetherby thought. “Not all of them. You don’t see a child everywhere.”
She said it unwillingly enough to make Minnie smile. They had not agreed, but something in the quarrel had become less comfortable for both.
Mrs Neale lifted a hand, then began speaking before it was all the way up. “I laughed when I read it.”
Her voice was so soft that Joan Hesketh asked her to repeat it. She pulled the yellow scarf out of her collar.
“I laughed. I didn’t think about the mother. I thought about having to listen.”
“Are you ashamed of laughing now?” Miss Holt asked.
“A little.”
“I’m not,” Miss Holt said. “It’s funny. I can see Mrs Larcombe’s objection and still find it funny.”
Mrs Neale looked relieved, then doubtful, and I liked her for not accepting the relief too quickly. She turned the page back. Beside me Grace was drawing a small shape with her finger on the closed cover of her book, not making a picture but following the movement of the dispute.
“What did you think, Mrs Bellamy?” Mrs Hesketh asked.
I could have said I needed to look again. I already had looked, while the women were talking. There was a pencil mark beside a phrase I had liked in my own copy, now lying in Bessie’s bag until she had time to return it.
“I enjoyed how quickly she made me understand the room,” I said. “I didn’t ask whether I ought to trust how she did it.”
“Must you stop enjoying it?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Nor do I,” Minnie said. “That’s what vexes me.”
The laugh that followed included her. She shut the book on one finger, still refusing to surrender her page.
Mrs Hesketh took us back to Captain Wentworth. What did his conduct show which the account of Mrs Musgrove did not? Grace thought it showed an ability to behave well while thinking something unflattering. Dora wanted to know whether good behaviour which one could not feel still counted. Miss Holt said she would rather have it than the alternative.
Mrs Wetherby raised a finger. “I have been rather hard on the mothers. I was thinking of one in particular.”
“So was I,” Minnie said.
They looked at one another. Neither supplied a name. Mrs Hesketh let the little silence remain, then opened the next passage. When she began reading I heard the particular warmth in her voice, the enjoyment which had first made me want her to come. I had been leaning forward without knowing it. My elbow had left a red mark on my wrist, and I rubbed it while I listened.
At the interval Bessie opened the doors and set the tray where we had agreed. The chairs were too close together near the back; Mrs Norridge pointed it out, and I moved two before everyone sat again. A single place had been sold at a price which did not cover refreshments, and Dora caught the mistake before taking the second payment. We put it right.
Mrs Neale came to the table for another cup of tea. “I thought I might be too ignorant,” she said.
“I didn’t know what to expect either.”
She looked up at me, then round the room. “I’ll come next time.”
“You have a place.”
“I know. But I mean I will.”
I gave her the cup. She went back to Mrs Tait, holding it in both hands.
During the second part I forgot the money for stretches at a time. It returned when I saw the new chairs, when Mrs Hesketh moved the lamp, when a woman admired the colour of the wall. But there was no way to make the book stop being good because I had behaved badly in bringing people to it. I listened. Once I asked a question, and Mrs Hesketh took it as seriously as she took the others.
At nine she closed the book. The applause startled me, not in its volume but in how much relief it contained. People had left homes, work, children, someone else’s comfort; now they could be glad they had come.
Mrs Hesketh thanked them and said where the next talk would begin. I stood before the conversations became unmanageable and told everyone we would close the room at half-past nine. They could stay until then. No one objected. A woman asked about the next dates, another whether a friend might come, and two bought single places for the following week.
I wrote the payments down immediately. Dora watched me, then put the spare coins into my hand and said she was going to walk with Ruth as far as the omnibus.
By twenty-five past nine only Minnie and her friend remained. Bessie was gathering cups. The speaker had gone, thanking her at the door as well as me. Minnie came to the front of the room and put a hand on my shoulder.
“You were good.”
“I scarcely spoke.”
“I heard you.”
I could not answer for a moment. She took her hand away without asking me to explain why a simple remark had become difficult.
“Tea next week,” she said. “No lamps to choose. Just tea.”
I agreed.
When she had gone, Bessie took the last tray to the kitchen. She had finished at the agreed time. I paid for the little extra interval work we had added in advance, and she wrote the amount beside the other money before putting it away.
“You can leave the cups,” I said. “I’ll wash them.”
“I was going to.”
She smiled then and put on her coat. Before lifting her bag she took out my copy of Persuasion. A strip torn from a plain envelope stood above the pages.
“Thank you. I stayed up far too late twice.”
“You finished?”
“Yes. I’ve put the place I liked best where you can find it.”
“Did you hear what they were saying about Mrs Musgrove?”
“A little. I wanted to know what came next, but the milk needed fetching. Is it all right if I ask Mrs Larcombe next time?”
“Of course.”
She put the book in my hand. “I like Mrs Croft. She seems to have enjoyed being married.”
“Without waiting eight years for it.”
“Or staying perfectly still while it happened.”
The flagged page was in the carriage ride. I looked down, found the admiral’s hazardous driving and began to smile.
“That’s your favourite?”
“It made me laugh out loud in Mrs Webb’s kitchen. She thought I’d had a letter.”
I laughed too. Bessie tapped the page once, as if making certain I would read the right bit, then took her bag. It closed much more easily without the book.
After she left I sat in the green room. Mr Leach’s lamp was on the table, the glass of water half full, two books stacked where Joan Hesketh had put them. Beyond the door the hall was dark. I heard the front door open, a key turn, and Nell’s step on the mat.
She looked in as she passed.
“Was it good?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
She was not making herself say it. I could hear that. She stood for a moment with her gloves in one hand, still wearing the dress in which she had gone out with Arthur.
“We walked along the river,” she said. “It was lovely.”
“I’m glad too.”
She nodded and went upstairs. I listened until her door shut, then took the cup and the books into the kitchen. I had no new permission from her and no reason to suppose the debt lighter. Still, she had told me where she had been. I washed the cup, dried it and put it away where she could find it in the morning.