The first stranger who came to buy a subscription asked whether I was Mrs Bellamy’s housekeeper.
I had flour on my sleeve and a cloth in my hand. There was nothing unreasonable in the mistake, and I might once have corrected it with a joke about doing all the work. Instead I said I was Mrs Bellamy and invited her in.
She was a little younger than me, wearing a hat with cherries which looked real enough to invite a bird. She had seen a notice at Mrs Norridge’s shop. Her husband had read it over her shoulder and said he supposed she would be joining the suffragettes next.
“I told him I thought of beginning with a book.”
“That seems quite enough for one evening.”
She laughed and took a seat. Her name was Mrs Caroline Tait. She had not been to any of the reading nights and did not know Ada. She wanted a place for herself and perhaps one for a neighbour, provided the neighbour could manage the journey.
I fetched the subscription book Nell had prepared. Mrs Tait looked at the page, then at the room.
“Do we pay now?”
“If you wish to reserve a place.”
“Then I’ll pay mine. I’ll ask her about hers.”
Seven shillings and sixpence. I wrote a receipt, blotted it and gave it to her. She folded it into her purse.
“I used to read while the boys were small,” she said. “Then they got bigger and I seemed to stop.”
“One would think it would be the other way round.”
“One would.”
She stood, settled the cherries and asked what time she should come. When she had gone I remained beside the table. She had paid me for an evening which did not yet exist, trusting that I could make a place for her in it.
I wiped the flour off my sleeve before taking the money downstairs.
The list grew slowly. Mrs Tait’s neighbour said yes, Dora’s friend no, Edith’s acquaintance perhaps. Ruth asked to pay for two single evenings in advance and I said I would arrange it, then made a note so I would not spend her money as if she had paid for six. Some women came to the door; others sent notes. I began to recognise the difference between I should love to and Here is the money, though not always before I had written a name in the wrong column.
Grace brought down the finished drawing on a sheet of stiff paper. My door stood a little open in it. Beneath, in careful letters, was my name.
I laid it on the table without touching the ink.
“You haven’t put the clock in,” I said.
“It isn’t outside.”
“No. Of course.”
She looked at me, smiling. “You can like it.”
“I do.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
I paid her, and she took the coins without trying to turn them into a gift. Later she came back for tea, brought her own cup down from her room and complained about a pupil who wanted every person in a drawing to have the same face. She was my lodger and a woman whose work I had bought. The three of us, with Nell, laughed over her demonstration of the pupil’s noble eyebrows.
Ada saw the drawing on Friday. She was in good spirits, having managed a visit without needing to stop for her hands, and she held the paper near the window to inspect the lettering.
“Eleanor Bellamy,” she said.
“That’s my name.”
“I know. You make it sound as if I’ve disputed it.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
She looked at the page again. “It will look very well.”
I had been ready for a correction and nearly missed the praise. I put the paper away before we could spoil the moment.
She asked about Nell’s dress. We went upstairs to see it, and my daughter stood in front of the glass while Ada inspected the neck and made one useful suggestion about the sleeve. Then she stepped back, and for a moment both of us looked at Nell without speaking.
“I remember when you were born,” Ada said. “Your mother wanted to put you by the window to see whether your eyes were blue.”
“They weren’t,” Nell said.
“They were then. Everything was blue except your feet.”
I laughed, because I had forgotten the feet. Thomas had worried about them until the nurse told him to stop putting his cold fingers against a perfectly contented baby. He had stood beside the bed, chastened and delighted, asking whether Nell ought to have socks.
Ada touched the sleeve. “He would have liked this.”
Nell looked at me in the glass. I nodded. There were things we did not have to explain in front of it.
Before she left, Ada gave my daughter an envelope. “Towards whatever you’ve forgotten. There is always something.”
“Aunt Ada—”
“I chose to give it. You may choose what to do with it.”
It was said a little formally. Nell took the envelope and kissed her. I went down with my sister and found her looking at the loose catch of the hall drawer.
“You still haven’t had that mended.”
“No.”
“Ask Arthur. He likes to be useful.”
“So do we all.”
She smiled. “Yes. But some of us make it quite difficult to refuse.”
I could not tell whether she meant herself or me. I let her have both.
The printer sent a proof of the notice on Monday. Mr Abel had put me in touch with him, and it pleased Nell to be the one who carried the envelope home. We opened it together. Grace’s door had become a little darker on the page, the steps more certain, and beneath it the letters announced Mrs Eleanor Bellamy’s Evenings.
“That’s wrong,” Nell said.
“What is?”
“The speaker’s name ought to be larger.”
I looked below my own. Joan Hesketh appeared in letters scarcely more substantial than the address. We had asked for the house drawing and the particulars, not this arrangement.
“It’s only a proof.”
“Then change it.”
I took a pencil. It rested above the page while I thought of all the notices I had seen which named the proprietor as well as the entertainment. There could be no harm in telling people who had organised the evenings. There could also be no reason to make the woman doing the work hard to find.
I drew a line beside the speaker’s name and wrote Larger. Then I drew another beside mine and wrote Smaller.
Nell watched me do it. She did not say well done. That would have been unbearable.
We sent it back. The next version had both names visible, which was what I had wanted before I knew how much I liked seeing one of them first.
On Tuesday the circle stayed late talking about whether to read the same play again and do it better, or a different one and make new mistakes. Dora put the question to a vote. The new mistakes won by one. Miss Holt looked pleased to have lost so narrowly, and offered to bring a book next time.
Edith stayed to help her aunt into her coat. Mrs Wetherby was reluctant to leave because she had begun a conversation with Grace about a picture in a shop. I took Edith’s chair while we waited.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I did.”
“You’ll come again?”
“If I can.”
I nearly asked what could prevent her. Instead I said there would be a chair. She looked towards her aunt, who was pointing out an error in Grace’s description with the pleasure of a woman prepared to argue for a long time.
“I might come without Aunt next week,” she said.
“Certainly.”
The word seemed to enlarge the room for her. She pulled on her gloves and called Mrs Wetherby by name, not by her title in the family. Her aunt looked up, laughed and came to the door.
When they had gone Bessie brought me the last cup of tea. We sat beside the low fire while Nell finished putting the chairs back. My copy of Persuasion lay face down on the table. Bessie picked it up and smoothed the bent page before handing it to me.
“Is that the one with the sailors?”
“Some sailors. I haven’t reached them all.”
“My brother says there are only two sorts in books. Those who are drowning and those who are about to drown.”
“There is an admiral who seems likely to remain dry.”
She smiled. “Then I should like to meet him.”
I turned the pages, looking for the Crofts’ visit, and came upon a place where I had put a pencil mark against Mrs Croft’s account of travelling with her husband. Bessie read over my shoulder, then asked to hold the book. I gave it to her.
“She’s been out of England,” she said, after a minute. “A great deal.”
“Would you want to?”
“I’d like to know.”
She looked down at the page again. I had been about to ask what she would do with her mother at home. The question was not nearly as interesting as the look on her face.
“Do you think she felt sick?” she asked.
“On the ship?”
“At first. If you could bear being sick for a little while and then get to see everything, it might be worth it. But I should hate to get all the way there and discover I couldn’t stand up.”
Nell sat on the arm of a chair. “Arthur was ill on a boat once. He told me as if it were something I ought to know before agreeing to marry him.”
“He could have said something much worse,” Bessie said.
“I told him I should keep him on land until after the wedding.”
We laughed. Bessie had kept a finger at the passage, and I could see her deciding whether to ask another question or give back the book.
“You can borrow it.”
“You haven’t finished.”
“I can have it back before the first talk. I have Charlotte Lucas to visit again.”
“I don’t read quickly.”
“Neither did I, when I kept trying to see who’d come into the kitchen.”
She closed the book, opened it again and checked how much remained. There was a sound from the street, the late omnibus passing. She looked towards the window, then back at the small volume.
“I could read on the way.”
“You might miss your stop,” I said.
“I don’t mind walking.”
She slipped it into her bag. The clasp would not close with it lying flat, so she turned it upright and put the purse beside it. Nell watched the adjustment with the absorption she brought to any small problem that could be solved without wasting what was already there.
“There’s something I brought for you,” Bessie said to her.
She took out a little paper packet, a remnant of blue ribbon for the wedding dress. Nell held it against her throat and looked at me.
“Not there,” I said. “At the waist, perhaps.”
We stood together in the hall trying it against the grey work dress, an unnecessary, happy occupation. The clock struck half-past nine. Bessie picked up her bag, and Nell folded the ribbon carefully enough that it would have no crease.