Mrs Norridge sent the balance on Saturday morning and a note asking whether I would let the room for a series of talks. Not political meetings, she said, though no one could promise that a roomful of women would keep from politics. Something about books. Something people could attend who did not wish to join anything.
She had liked the house. She thought other people would like it too.
I read that part twice before taking the note downstairs.
“How many talks?” Nell asked.
“She doesn’t say.”
“Then we must ask.”
“I might go and see her.”
“Good.”
The approval was immediate and a little absent. She was sewing the last hooks onto her wedding dress, a cream-coloured wool so fine I was frightened to touch it with rough fingers. She had decided against white satin because she wanted a dress she could wear again. Arthur’s mother had said that a woman should have one day on which she need not think of usefulness. For once I agreed with her, but Nell had already chosen the cloth.
“Will you turn round?” I asked.
She stood. The dress was not finished at the neck and one sleeve was still basted. Even so it fitted her in a way I had not anticipated. She had always had a figure, of course; I had let her clothes down and taken them in for years. That morning she looked like a woman who had somewhere she wished to go, and the dress was following her.
“It’s beautiful.”
“The sleeve pulls.”
“Only when you stand like that.”
“I might want to stand like that.”
She lifted her arm again. I put my hand inside the seam to feel where it held, and she rested her weight against me while I found it. For a few minutes we were occupied by a difficulty which could be corrected with a needle.
Mrs Norridge’s shop smelled of new cloth and warm paper. She took me into a room behind the counter where a young woman was writing labels. When she had given the girl a task elsewhere she pulled out a chair for me.
“What would you like to do?”
“You wrote about talks.”
“Yes. But what would you like?”
I had come prepared to discuss chairs. The question caught me in the same place Nell had touched on census night.
“I like the reading evenings.”
“Then keep them.”
“I would like other women to come. Women who don’t already know one another.”
“And you would like the house to earn more.”
I nodded.
“There’s nothing disgraceful in that.” She moved a pile of invoices away from the edge of the desk. “You needn’t wrap it in improving people.”
I was glad she had said it before I began wrapping.
We talked for half an hour. She knew a woman named Joan Hesketh who spoke to small audiences about books. There would be a fee, and Mrs Hesketh might not have dates available until June. Mrs Norridge could introduce us, but she would not guarantee attendance. She said this twice, kindly on the first occasion and without kindness on the second, so I could not mistake it for mere modesty.
“People admire things they don’t buy,” she said. “You’ve seen them looking at curtains in a window.”
“Yes.”
“A talk is a curtain you cannot take home. You must make them want it beforehand.”
I left with a name, an address and a borrowed book about women writers. On the way home I stopped at a window where curtains had been made into a little room, complete with a table set for two. No one lived there. No one had to wash the cups. Yet three women stood beside me looking at it as if it were a glimpse of the life they ought to have had.
That evening I brought down Grace’s drawing of the house. Nell was working on Mr Abel’s figures at the table, with his permission to finish a little copying at home. I laid the drawing near her lamp.
“Could it be printed?”
She looked at it, then at the borrowed book. “For a notice?”
“A little programme. The house on the front, perhaps.”
“We should ask Grace.”
“Of course.”
She put down the pen. “Have you engaged someone?”
“Not yet. Mrs Norridge is making an introduction.”
“Then we don’t know what it costs.”
“We could find out about printing.”
“We can find out anything, Mother. That isn’t the same as needing it.”
I took the drawing away, more sharply than I meant to. A corner struck the inkstand. Nell caught it before any ink spilt.
“I’m not trying to spoil it.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
She looked at the book, at the papers in front of her, then went back to the line she had been adding. I had interrupted paid work to ask about my drawing. There had been no argument because she had declined to have one.
In the hall I found Grace coming downstairs. I showed her what I had brought. She held it towards the window, examining the lines.
“I’d do another for printing. This has too much shading.”
“Would you?”
“If you pay me.”
She smiled. I smiled too, though there had been a half-second in which the words stung. I had reduced her board without being asked, and some part of me had expected gratitude to circulate until it came back as a free drawing.
“Tell me what you would charge.”
She named a small sum and said she would give me something I could use whether or not the talks happened. A little view of the door with the number on it. She would put my name below if I liked.
“Not Mrs T. Bellamy,” I said.
She waited.
“Eleanor Bellamy.”
“Certainly.”
I went upstairs with the old drawing in my hands. Thomas had been dead four years. There were letters in my drawer which still came addressed to Mrs T. Bellamy, and I had written the same thing myself as recently as the previous Christmas. I put the picture on the dressing table and stood a moment before the glass.
My hair was coming loose beside one temple. There were silver strands I had stopped trying to conceal, not from principle but because the effort exceeded the result. I took out a pin, wound the loose piece back and put it in again. My face in the glass was neither transformed nor particularly pleased with itself. It was simply the face I would take to the appointment with Mrs Hesketh.
On Sunday Nell and Arthur invited me to see their rooms.
They were on the first floor of a house whose owner took care of the steps. I noticed that before anything else. Inside, the passage smelt of polish instead of the damp which rose through my own basement after rain. The landlady showed us upstairs, said what time the hot water was brought, and left us alone.
Nell went straight to the front window. The blue curtains lay folded on the table, waiting to be hung.
“You see,” she said. “Morning sun.”
I could see it. There was a small sitting room, a bedroom behind it and a little place where they could prepare meals. Not grand. Not even as large as the rooms she was leaving. But in the corner beside the window stood a table Arthur had bought from a man at work, with a drawer which ran properly and no old ink on the top.
“For your books,” he said to her.
She turned to him. He was watching her, trying not to seem as anxious as he was. She crossed the room and kissed him, an ordinary brief kiss which made me look away and feel foolish for looking away.
“There will be a chair,” he said. “I haven’t got it yet.”
I stood by the window while Nell measured the curtains. A woman in the street below carried a loaf tucked under one arm. Somewhere in the house a child was practising scales, stopping on the same wrong note each time. I would have to find my daughter here. I would not be able to call from the kitchen and hear her answer through the floor.
“Would you like the little chair from my room?” I asked.
“The one with the curved back?”
“It would fit the table.”
She looked at Arthur. He nodded.
“I should like that very much.”
I had given her beds, clothes, lessons when we could afford them, and portions of myself she had not asked to receive. The chair was small enough for her to choose.
We hung the curtains together. Arthur held the steps while Nell reached, and I passed the rings up one at a time. When we drew them across the window the light came through blue, just as it had in my room, only here it belonged.
On the way home I bought a new exercise book. Not a household account book, but a plain one with unruled pages. Upstairs I wrote my name inside it, the same name Grace was going to put beneath the drawing. Then I wrote the date of the appointment Mrs Norridge had arranged.
There were all the other pages left. I ran a thumb along their edges before shutting the cover, enjoying how many there were.