Joan Hesketh lived above a dentist. I saw the brass plate before I saw her name on the bell and had time, climbing the stairs, to regret not having my teeth attended to when Thomas was alive. It was an unhelpful beginning to an appointment at which I wished to appear competent.
She opened the door herself. She was perhaps my age, wearing a brown dress with a handsome collar and a pencil tucked into the fastening of her hair. There were books on the floor behind her, a chair with a broken rush seat, and a smell of toast.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I haven’t.”
She took me into a room at the back and gave me a chair from which a pile of papers had just been removed. The toast stood beside a cup which appeared to have been used already. She spread butter on a piece and asked what I had in mind.
“Talks for women. About books.”
“Which women?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She looked at me over the toast. There was no contempt in it, but no attempt to make my answer better than it was.
“Mrs Norridge says you have a reading circle.”
“They read plays. They aren’t mine. They hire the room.”
“That’s a useful distinction. Do they want talks as well?”
“Some might.”
“Have you asked?”
I folded my gloves more neatly. “I wanted to know whether it was possible first.”
“Anything is possible if someone pays for it. The difficulty is finding the right someone.”
We talked about the room. She asked how many people could hear comfortably, whether there was a table to stand beside, whether the street was noisy and whether my regular lodgers would object. I answered the last question with a history of Mr Harcourt which she listened to politely until I heard myself beginning to explain his taste in tea.
“One person left,” she said. “The others haven’t.”
“No.”
“Then you must decide what that tells you. I can’t.”
She finished the toast, wiped her fingers and took a notebook off the shelf. For six evenings, each with a short reading and discussion, she would charge six guineas. She could offer dates in June and July. A deposit of two guineas would secure them; the balance would be due after the third evening. If we had not enough definite subscribers by the date we agreed, we could abandon the scheme before the deposit was paid.
She set all this down in a letter while I watched. There was comfort in the clean shape of the terms, though I had not yet made the money to meet them.
“I can’t promise to make it popular,” she said. “I can promise to prepare properly.”
“That’s what I want.”
She blotted the letter. “Are you sure? Many people want the audience more than they want what I do.”
I laughed, because it seemed the right thing, but she did not.
On the way down I stopped at the landing window. In the little yard below, a boy was hanging a rug over a line. He thumped it with the side of his hand, watched the dust rise and stepped back. The spring sun lay warm on the glass. I had been in a room with a woman whose work she could describe in a few sentences, and who knew what she could not sell.
I took her letter home in the inside pocket of my coat.
Nell read it after supper. She made no remark about the fee. She asked how many subscriptions I thought I could sell, and we worked out what would remain at different numbers. Twenty-four would make a modest return if we did not spend too much in advance. Eighteen would leave very little. Fewer than that would require something I could not honestly call a business plan.
“Then eighteen is too few,” she said.
“We might sell places for single evenings.”
“We might. But they aren’t sold now.”
I heard Mrs Hesketh asking which women.
“I’ll ask the circle on Tuesday.”
“And write down who really says yes.”
She gave the letter back. I looked at her fingers, still marked by the dressmaking needle, and wanted to say I was proud of her. I had said it often enough about smaller things. Now the words seemed to require an admission about what I had failed to see before.
“You do this very well,” I said.
She lifted her head. “The sums?”
“More than the sums.”
For a moment she looked as she had when she was little and I told her the cake she made was good. Then her face settled back into the woman’s face I was learning to know.
“So do you,” she said. “When you let yourself find out first.”
On Tuesday I asked the circle. Dora wanted to know whether they would still have their reading nights. I said certainly. The woman in spectacles, whose name was Miss Agnes Holt and whom I had finally learnt to address without privately calling her anything else, asked whether there would be questions after the talks. Ruth wished to know if she could come to two instead of six. Edith Wetherby, who had arrived with her aunt and chosen her own chair, said she would like to hear about a woman writer whose books she had not already read.
No one said yes in the way I had imagined. They asked practical questions, and I answered what I knew. By the time the books opened I had three definite subscriptions and four people who might ask a friend.
I sat down with a disappointment so disproportionate that I feared it would show. Bessie put a cup beside me, then left me to deal with it. That was what I had paid her for, I reminded myself; she was not required to make the tea into comfort.
We were reading a different play that evening, an old comedy with too many people waiting outside doors. I lost my place twice. At the interval Miss Holt came to sit beside me.
“Have you heard this woman speak?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps that would help.”
“I suppose it would.”
“I don’t mean to offend you. I’ve heard an hour’s lecture in which nobody said anything that couldn’t have been read from the title.”
She took a sweet from Dora’s packet and offered it to me. I accepted. It stuck to my tooth, so for a moment neither of us could say anything further.
Mrs Hesketh was speaking the following Saturday in a room above a shop. When I wrote to ask, she sent me the address without a hint that I ought to have thought of it sooner. I invited Nell. She had promised Arthur’s mother a visit and said she would rather keep the promise, if I could manage alone.
I could manage alone. I had been going to market alone for years, arguing with tradesmen alone, making decisions at night which no one else could share. Still, I nearly asked Ada to come.
Instead I put on the good blue dress and went.
There were twenty people in the room, not all women. I paid for a place and sat near the back. Mrs Hesketh came in carrying a bag full of books, put them on the table and asked that the window be opened before she began. There was no transformation. She was the same woman who had eaten toast while I tried to explain my hopes. Then she opened a book, read a little, and asked a question which made me wish I had brought a pencil.
Her subject was Charlotte Lucas, who married Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. I remembered liking Elizabeth Bennet and wishing the cousin would stop talking. I had not considered how much of Charlotte’s married life might be arranged round the same wish.
Mrs Hesketh asked a woman at the front to read the part about the room Charlotte chose to sit in. The woman read it with a growing smile, and when she finished a man in the second row said it showed how comfortably Charlotte had settled herself.
“Or how much trouble she took not to see her husband,” said the woman beside him.
He looked at her. She kept a finger on the place.
“Those needn’t be different observations,” Mrs Hesketh said.
The man thought Charlotte fortunate to have been offered a home. He was not sneering. He explained that his own mother had kept house for a brother after being widowed, and never possessed a room in which she could leave a book open. Charlotte had a room. He would not make light of it.
“Nor would I,” said his neighbour. “But I should like to know if she can keep him out of it.”
There was a laugh. The man joined in, a little late.
Mrs Hesketh asked us to look at the practical arrangements Charlotte made. People found different things. A woman behind me had marked the garden; another thought the housekeeper would matter more than the garden. I found a sentence in which Elizabeth was surprised, and began wondering whether a friend was obliged to be pleased by an arrangement she would hate for herself.
I put up my hand before I could decide it was not a sufficiently clever question.
“Does Elizabeth have to like the marriage?”
“Must she?” Mrs Hesketh asked the room.
The woman beside the man said no. The man said she ought to acknowledge its advantages. A third woman, so far silent, said her sisters acknowledged the advantages of her husband so frequently that she had stopped telling them anything about him.
No one laughed at that. The woman looked embarrassed, then relieved when Mrs Hesketh asked whether she thought Elizabeth might be doing the same thing from the opposite direction, seeing only what she herself could not endure.
“Perhaps,” she said. “I should have to look again.”
I wanted to look again too. I had been prepared to enjoy the clever heroine and the ridiculous man. Now there was a whole marriage going on in rooms I had passed through too quickly.
Mrs Hesketh ended by naming Persuasion for those who wished to try another Austen. It had a marriage she liked very much, she said, but she would not tell us which. Someone called out a guess. She shut her book and said she would not deprive us of the pleasure of catching her in a bad judgement.
Afterwards I waited while three people spoke to Mrs Hesketh. When my turn came she knew me at once.
“Did it help?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“I’d like to do it. The series.”
She smiled, but did not put out her hand for a deposit. “Get the subscribers first. You have time.”
Outside, I bought a pencil at the shop below. I stood on the pavement with the little exercise book Nell had not seen, and wrote Charlotte’s sitting room before the thought escaped. A woman coming out stopped beside me.
“Were you at the talk?”
“Yes.”
“I think the woman who mentioned her sisters was right,” she said. “But I still don’t like Charlotte’s husband.”
“I don’t think anyone asked us to.”
She laughed, and we spoke for perhaps five minutes. She was going to catch a train; I was going home to put potatoes on. Before leaving she asked whether I would be at the next talk. It pleased me that she wanted to hear what I might think by then.
At a second-hand stall near the corner I found Persuasion among books arranged with more hope than order. The binding had worn at the top. I opened it in the middle, found a captain and a conversation about a ship, then shut it before I could discover whether the captain was the husband Mrs Hesketh preferred.
It cost ninepence. I had meant to buy new braid for my cuffs. The old braid would bear another brushing, and I bought the book.
In the omnibus I tried to read the first page and found I had started halfway down, distracted by the pleasure of possessing it. I went back to the beginning. By the time I reached my stop I disliked Sir Walter Elliot so much that I walked past the street before remembering to turn.