Bessie told me she was leaving on the day of the third talk. I had paid Joan Hesketh’s remaining fee that morning, put the receipt in the book and allowed myself the luxury of believing I had reached the end of immediate difficulties.
I had also answered Mr Vale before his June deadline, saying I wished to stay but wanted to discuss the terms. His reply gave me a July appointment with his aunt and asked for an outline of what I proposed. I had put the date in my book, leaving a whole page for the outline.
“Mrs Fenwick knows,” she said. “I’ve given her notice. I meant to tell you sooner, but I wanted the new place settled.”
“What place?”
“At a dressmaker’s. Three afternoons and some mornings. More to begin with, while I learn her ways.”
I looked at the tea things on the table. “Will you still be able to come here?”
“Not in July.”
Bessie stood with her coat over her arm. She had dressed in a blouse with a little pale stitching at the throat, made from a piece which someone else had discarded. The stitching was blue; I had thought it white until she moved towards the window.
“Are you pleased?” I asked.
“Very.”
The word came at once. I put down the cloth I had been folding.
“Tell me about it.”
She sat. The dressmaker was someone she had met through Mrs Webb. There would be repairs as well as new work, regular hours as far as they could be managed and a wage which did not depend on whether a husband remembered an instruction given to him at breakfast. Bessie said that last part dryly, not asking me to defend Ada.
“I’ll still go to see her,” she added. “If she wants me.”
“She will.”
“Not to stay late and mend everything she hasn’t shown the new woman.”
I smiled. She put her coat over the chair.
“And I should like to come here once. To sit down.”
“Of course.”
“I mean to pay for a place. Like anyone else.”
I asked which evening she wanted. She chose the last.
“I’ll put you down.”
“Elizabeth Ward.”
I wrote it in full. She took out the little purse which had once held a receipt instead of the wages it should have represented, and paid for her ticket.
That evening Bessie noticed Mrs Neale standing uncertainly beside an empty cup, filled it before I could move and guided a latecomer to the spare chair without interrupting the speaker. The woman sat, looked round and began to listen. I returned to the page.
Joan Hesketh’s subject was a woman who wished to write and had not the conditions in which to do it. Some of the audience wanted to discuss courage, some money. Miss Holt remarked that a locked door was not helpful if someone on the other side kept calling through it. Dora said a door was an improvement over a desk beside the man who dictated what you ought to think. They disagreed cheerfully until Mrs Hesketh brought them back to the book.
I had no task to perform during that conversation. I let myself miss Bessie before she had left.
After the guests went we drank a cup of tea. I told her about a blouse I had seen in a window near Minnie’s tea shop. She asked whether I wanted it copied, and I said no, I had only liked looking at it.
“Then look again,” she said. “It doesn’t send a bill.”
We laughed. When she stood to go I held out my hand. She shook it, then kissed my cheek with a quickness which prevented the gesture from becoming a ceremony.
“Tell Mrs Fenwick I’m coming on Sunday,” I said.
“You can tell her yourself. She’ll be glad to hear from you.”
She took her coat from the peg. I watched her leave, not as far as the corner this time. She had somewhere she wanted to be and did not require an anxious audience for the walk.
On Sunday I went to Hampstead.
I had been in Ada’s house often enough to admire it without feeling curious. That afternoon I noticed the things she touched: the little box on the side table containing gloves she could no longer fasten easily, the cushion which supported her elbow, the cup with a broad handle Bessie must have found for her. There was a woman in the kitchen whom I had not met, employed for the household rather than my sister alone. She showed me in and said Mrs Fenwick was in the garden.
Ada sat beneath a tree with a book open on her knees. She looked up when she heard me and closed it without marking the place.
“You needn’t stop.”
“I had.”
I sat beside her. The garden was larger than the patch behind my house, with a path she could walk without stepping over a bucket. A little table held two glasses and a jug. The water had slices of lemon in it, a refinement I had always privately found unnecessary and which I was grateful for that warm afternoon.
“How is Bessie?” I asked.
“Excited.”
“She told me.”
Ada looked at the closed book. “I helped her find the hours. Wrote to the dressmaker. She doesn’t mention that.”
“She told me you’d been generous about leaving.”
It was not precisely what Bessie had said, and I heard the old habit of repairing one person’s feeling with another person’s words. I corrected it.
“No. She said you knew. I shouldn’t put more into it.”
Ada turned towards me. For a moment I expected anger. She looked tired instead.
“I didn’t do it to keep her. I thought I did, at first. Then the woman wrote back and I saw what it would mean to her.”
“What will you do?”
“Try someone new. Without assuming she knows me before I’ve met her.”
She poured water slowly. I let her do it. On the far side of the tree a child in the next garden was being told not to step on something and asking why it had been planted where he wanted to step.
“I miss having you,” Ada said.
“You have me.”
“No. I mean having you without needing to arrange a meeting or pay for a room.”
She put the closed book on the table between us.
“You could come for tea,” I said. “On a day there isn’t an event.”
“And not inspect the paper?”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.”
She smiled. “Very well.”
We spoke of Minnie. Ada remembered her chiefly as a girl who could not be trusted to be solemn. I remembered Ada at the same age insisting we keep our gloves clean for a visit, then losing one before we got there. She disputed the story, we reconstructed the route, and by the time the maid brought tea we had arrived at a version which satisfied neither of us but made us both laugh.
I stayed until the shade had moved across the table. William was not at home. My sister did not explain his absence, and I did not ask what permission had been needed to make room for mine.
At the gate she caught my sleeve.
“I was sorry about Nell.”
“I know.”
“And angry with you.”
“I know that too.”
She looked down at the hand holding my sleeve, opened it slowly and let the cloth go.
“Come again before there is another thing to settle.”
I promised. At the corner I opened my small book and left the following Sunday afternoon clear.