I missed most of the fourth talk.
There was no disaster to excuse it. The kettle boiled, the cups were clean, and no one fell ill at the door. I had simply undertaken to give eighteen people refreshments while the woman I wished to hear was speaking, and Bessie was no longer being paid to make those two things possible at once.
Nora Clegg could not come in the evening. Her daughter had returned to work and the boy whose boat I borrowed from my kitchen spoon was with her after five. She told me when I asked, without apology; the hours I had hired were mornings. I could have found someone else. I had asked two people, disliked the price of one and the uncertainty of the other, then told myself I could manage for three nights.
At half-past seven I gave the introduction and sat down. At a quarter to eight someone arrived late and I went to the door. By eight I was checking the water. At ten past I heard a laugh through the wall and stood with a spoon in my hand, waiting to see whether the laughter would tell me what had been said.
It did not.
When I carried the tray in Joan Hesketh was reading a passage which made Miss Holt lean forward. The women shifted to make room, thanked me and took their cups. I put the tray down and went back for the milk.
In the kitchen I found Grace waiting beside the stove.
“I can take that.”
“You should be listening.”
“So should you.”
I gave her the jug. She carried it in, set it down and stayed there. I followed with the spare biscuits, then remained in the doorway because the place I had left was now occupied by a latecomer’s bag. I could have asked her to move it. Instead I stood, uncertain where to interrupt, until Joan Hesketh stopped speaking and pointed to the empty chair by the wall.
“Mrs Bellamy. Sit down.”
I did.
It was not a rebuke, but it embarrassed me. The women turned back to the book. I spent the next five minutes attending to their comfort in my head, the milk, the heat, whether the last row could see. By the time I returned to the discussion it had moved on.
Afterwards Dora came to the kitchen while I washed cups. She had stayed to fetch a book she left on the sideboard, and looked at the stack beside me.
“Don’t do all of them tonight.”
“Nora comes in the morning.”
“Then leave them.”
“She has other work.”
“So have you.”
I put a cup into the clean water. “I couldn’t hear what she said about the ending.”
“Ask her next week.”
“She’ll be doing something else.”
Dora took a cloth and dried one cup. I said she need not help. She said she was drying one cup because it was in her hand, not entering a new profession. We laughed, and I took the cloth from her when she had finished.
“The circle doesn’t need this much tea,” she said.
“Some do.”
“Then they can pay someone to serve it. We don’t need you trying to make the evening perfect before you’re allowed to take part.”
She said it briskly, already looking for the book. I would have resented the remark from Nell, because it would have been so closely related to everything she had been telling me. From Dora I could hear it as a suggestion about a room, not a judgement on my life.
She found the book and went home. I left the remaining cups for Nora, with a note saying there would be less other work in the sitting room because I had done it that afternoon. Then I went upstairs.
Nell was reading on her bed. She had not come to the talk. She was still entitled to that choice without having to explain it anew each Thursday. I stopped at the open door to say good night.
“Did you hear much?” she asked.
“Not as much as I hoped.”
She looked at the damp place on my sleeve. “You could have asked someone.”
“I did. Not in time.”
She put a finger between the pages. I could see advice ready to come, the old quickness with which she saw how things might be made easier. Then she closed her mouth and waited.
“I will arrange the next one differently,” I said.
“Good.”
I sat on the chair near her door, not on the bed. She returned to the book, then looked up again.
“Mr Abel has asked me to stay another three months.”
“At the same rate?”
“Eight shillings. I asked.”
“And he said yes?”
“He said he would think about it. Then he came back from lunch and said he supposed he’d have to.”
She smiled. It was the first full smile she had given me about her work since the morning at the breakfast table. I wanted to ask whether she would spend the extra money on the room. I did not. She could tell me what she wished.
“I found an old mistake this afternoon,” she said. “His, not mine. He’d paid the same bill twice and never noticed.”
“Will he get it back?”
“They’ve agreed a credit. He was cross before he was pleased.”
“Did you let him be?”
“I had to.”
We laughed a little. She showed me a line in the book she was reading, not a lesson about mothers or money, but a description which had made her want to see the place. I read it and asked where it was. She told me, and for a while we talked about somewhere neither of us had been.
The next morning I went to the dressmaker who had fixed Nell’s sleeve. I asked whether she knew a woman who might want evening work at the house. She did, and called into the back room. A woman of about forty came out with a strip of cloth pinned along her forearm. Her name was Ellen Marsh, which startled me into telling her my maiden name before explaining the work.
“No relation,” she said. “As far as I know.”
She listened to the hours, the tasks and the evenings. She had a grown daughter, a mother who lived with her and a husband who worked late. She could come twice, for the remaining talks, if she knew the time would not extend because someone wished for more tea.
I agreed a price which made me understand Bessie’s better, and a finishing time I wrote down while Ellen watched. I would move the chairs before she arrived. She would set out and serve the refreshments, wash the cups and leave. If a guest wanted to remain after the room closed, I would be the one to say no.
“I can do that,” she said.
So could I. I went home with her name in my book and the money for the two evenings put aside.
Grace was on the stairs with her brother’s umbrella. He had come to take her to see a picture she had admired and left the umbrella behind after insisting it was going to rain. She had made tea, discovered they disagreed about the picture and sent him away promising to return next week anyway.
“He asked if I meant to stay here in the winter,” she said.
“Do you?”
“I’d like to.”
I had not asked my lodgers before deciding I might change the house. I had merely supposed they would remain where I placed them. Now I told her I was talking to Mr Vale about the next term, and would say before agreeing anything which affected her.
“Thank you.”
She put the umbrella in the stand. “You should see the drawing I sold.”
“You sold one?”
“To Mrs Larcombe. She liked the woman in it.”
“Which woman?”
Grace looked at me, amused. “You. From the first evening. I ought to have asked if you minded.”
I stood still. I had watched her make sketches of Ruth and the baby, looked at her work on my own walls, and had not once thought I might be among the people she chose to draw when no one was paying her to notice them.
She went upstairs and came down with the paper before delivering it. I sat by the fire in the drawing, holding a book, head turned towards someone outside the page. My mouth was open, not beautifully, as if I had begun to answer.
“I don’t look like that,” I said.
“Sometimes you do.”
I looked longer. It was neither the face in my morning glass nor the woman I had hoped to become when I ordered the lamp. Grace had drawn me while I was listening, before I thought about how I appeared. I gave the picture back carefully.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m glad she liked it.”
Grace smiled, slid it into its cover and went to finish the letter that would go with it. I took Harry’s umbrella out of the stand and put it behind the hall table so no visitor would mistake it for one they were free to borrow. Then I went down to make lunch, thinking of the woman on the page who had been about to speak.