Nell went out with Arthur after luncheon. She had put on the straw hat we had trimmed together in February, and the sight of it standing upright on her head, as if we had known then that a spring afternoon would arrive, made me ashamed of the pleasure I took in seeing her go.
“You’ll be back for supper?”
“I shall eat with Arthur’s mother.”
“Oh.”
“She asked on Thursday. I told you.”
It was becoming a refrain. I kissed her and said I hoped she enjoyed herself. When she had gone I found the little piece of blue cloth folded on the sitting-room table. I put it in the drawer where I kept things which would be wanted later and could easily be lost before then.
The house had settled after the morning commotion. Mr Harcourt had gone to visit a friend and Miss Pym was spending the afternoon with her sister, though both intended to come back to sleep. Mrs Keene sat in her usual place near the dining-room window, making buttonholes. Her needle went into the cloth and came out again almost before I could see where it had been. Bessie had gone home for her things. Ada was upstairs resting her wrists, a fact she had requested I not describe as resting, and the visitors were making their own little arrangements.
Ruth came into the kitchen while I was peeling apples. She held a letter with no stamp on it.
“Could I put this somewhere until tomorrow? I don’t want to lose it.”
“Certainly.”
She gave it to me and remained standing. There was a name on the front, Mrs Ellen Ellis, written in a round school hand.
“My mother,” she said. “In case she hears about this from someone else.”
“Would you like me to post it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I dried my hand and opened the cupboard where I kept the household papers. The census schedule lay on the shelf below Mr Vale’s letter. I had carried it from the hall table when Mrs Price spilt a little tea; even a document one meant to resist ought not, I had thought, to be sticky.
Ruth saw it. “Would you really have to pay if we didn’t answer?”
“I might.”
“Mrs Fenwick said they couldn’t possibly trouble everyone.”
“She may be right about what they will do. That isn’t quite the same as what they may do.”
Ruth pressed the seam of her skirt between a finger and thumb. There was a darn near the waistband, beautifully neat and not quite the right colour.
“I’m not frightened for myself,” she said.
“You’re allowed to be.”
She looked at me so quickly that I was sorry for it. There was something indecent about recognising a feeling before a person had decided to show it.
“My mother lives with my aunt. If I lose my place, I can’t go back without putting someone out. She doesn’t say so. She writes about the flowers.”
I laid the letter on the shelf. “I won’t post it without asking.”
“Thank you.”
She took an apple from the bowl and asked whether she could help. I found another knife, and for a while we stood at opposite sides of the table, peeling. She could take the skin off in one unbroken ribbon. Mine came away in scraps.
“My grandmother used to throw it over her shoulder,” she said. “To see the first letter of the man she’d marry.”
“Did it work?”
“She married Albert. Everything she threw made an S.”
I laughed. She laughed too, a startled little sound, as if we had escaped something. I put the apples in the dish and gave her the sugar to scatter. She did it lavishly. At home she had probably been told not to.
Ada found us there with a copy of the handbill in her hand. She had changed the lace at her throat and taken down the conspicuous feather. Without the hat she looked more like the sister who had sat on my bed and told me Thomas Bellamy was going to propose, because all his other errands to our house could no longer account for the frequency.
“We have been invited to a gathering later,” she said. “But Mrs Wetherby says she’d rather stay here. It depends what everybody wants.”
She directed that last sentence at Ruth. I appreciated the effort even while resenting the faint performance of it.
“I like it here,” Ruth said.
“Then we’ll have something to do.” Ada held out the paper. “Perhaps readings. Music, if anyone plays.”
“The piano doesn’t,” I said.
She looked at the sitting-room door. Our piano had been untuned for a year and six months, though I called it a year. Nell could coax a tune out of it by avoiding a stretch in the middle. Thomas had bought it used with the understanding that I would return to lessons. We had since spent enough moving it and keeping it to have bought a good deal of music in places where someone else played.
“We shall manage.”
“After supper,” I said. “I must have the table back to lay it.”
For the next two hours I forgot the question of the census because there was a pie to make, a fire to tend and a man at the back door with the wrong order of coal. I had got into an argument with him over the quantity when Bessie returned. She stood beside me, carrying her night things in a little cloth parcel, and said that the man had brought exactly what was on his paper, which was not what was on mine. It was the distinction I had been trying to express for five minutes. She made it so plainly that he looked at both papers and took the sack away without further complaint.
“You can help me buy coal next time,” I said.
“If you want an argument done properly, I charge extra.”
I was still smiling when I went upstairs to call Ada.
She had fallen asleep with her gloves beside her. Her face in repose had less certainty than I was accustomed to seeing, and more resemblance to our father’s. I shut the door softly. She could eat when she woke.
At eight, after the washing up, Mrs Wetherby sat down at the piano and informed us she had been waiting forty years to play something other than a hymn for an audience of women who were not her pupils. She tried two chords, listened with her head on one side, and shifted the stool.
“It has opinions.”
“Only four of the notes,” I said.
She played a music-hall air I knew and could not at first place. Dora supplied the first line; Grace, who had spent supper seeming too shy to give an opinion on the pie, stood beside the piano and sang the rest in a low, astonishing voice. Even Mr Harcourt came to the door. He watched for a verse, then shut it, but more gently than I expected.
Ada had come down in time for her pie. Now she sat on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her skirts and laughed with Mrs Price over the words. Bessie was on an upright chair near the hearth, mending the thumb of her glove. I had not asked her to clear away the teacups. There were three on the mantelpiece and a fourth balanced alarmingly on the piano. The house did not collapse.
Someone began a verse which Mrs Wetherby declared unsuitable for a widowed schoolmistress. She accompanied it all the same.
I went to the window, partly to let out the heat, partly because I wanted a moment in which no one could see me enjoying myself. Along Ashcombe Street the lamps stood in a soft distance. A man passed with a parcel under his arm. Upstairs Mr Harcourt had begun moving his chair; I could hear the short scrape through the ceiling. Nothing outside had changed, but in my sitting room a woman of sixty-one was attacking my piano and Ruth Ellis was laughing with her head thrown back.
“You should let this room more often,” Dora said, beside me.
“I let bedrooms.”
“I know. But a room where you could make some noise and not have a man tell you to stop.”
She glanced at the ceiling and grinned. “Mostly.”
“What would you do in it?”
“This. Read something. Talk. The rooms near the office are either too dear or want a week’s notice and a committee. Sometimes you don’t know until four o’clock what you want to say.”
I laughed. It seemed likely to me that Dora knew at breakfast most of the things she wanted to say by four.
She took her cup from the piano and went back to the others. For a moment I looked at the room as she might have seen it: a fireplace, a table, enough chairs if one fetched them, a door which could be shut. It was difficult, after years of polishing and paying for something, to imagine that it might be wanted for a reason other than the one you had provided.
Nell came home a little after nine. She stood in the doorway until I saw her, then jerked her head towards the hall.
“Arthur’s mother sent you this.”
It was a little dish of potted meat, covered with paper. I took it from her and asked how the afternoon had been.
“Nice.”
I waited.
“We walked. The rooms are very bright. There’s a patch on the ceiling in the kitchen, but the landlady says it’s old.”
“It always is.”
She smiled. “I told Arthur you would say that.”
I wanted to ask whether she was happy, but the question had become so large that it would have made a truthful answer difficult. I asked whether she wanted tea instead. She did.
In the kitchen she took off her gloves and laid them beside the dish. “Did Aunt Ada pay you back?”
“Tuesday.”
“I put the washing bill off until Wednesday.”
“I might have managed that.”
“But I did.”
I put water on and let the sentence lie between us without tidying it away.
Through the wall came the end of the song, then applause and Mrs Wetherby saying she had never received such applause for so many errors. Nell leaned against the kitchen table and listened.
“They sound happy.”
“They are.”
“Good.”
It was so sincerely said that I reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She allowed it for a moment before stepping away.
“I wish you would think about the house, though.”
“I never stop thinking about it.”
“You think about the next meal, and who’s coming, and the fires. I mean whether you want another three years. What happens after I go.”
“I can manage without you.”
I heard how quickly I had said it. Nell’s face closed, not entirely but enough.
“I know that, Mother.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I was asking if you wanted to.”
The kettle had begun to hiss. I moved it off the hottest part of the stove.
“And do what instead?”
“We might find out.”
Before I could answer, Bessie appeared at the door. Ada was asking for the schedule. Everyone wanted to look at it.
I took it from the cupboard and carried it into the sitting room. It was less imposing under lamplight than I had expected, a large piece of paper which might be spoilt with one careless drop from a pen. I put it on the table. The women came towards it, all except Mrs Keene, who had joined us after finishing her work and now kept her chair by the fire.
Ada rested a finger on an empty space. “We can write our objection here.”
“You can write yours,” Nell said.
Ada looked up. “Yes, of course.”
“I mean Mother has other people to account for. Mr Harcourt and Mrs Keene and Miss Pym. Me.”
“No one proposes to interfere with the gentlemen.”
“You haven’t mentioned the other women.”
I saw Ada bite back a reply. She had been trying hard since breakfast and was growing tired of it. On the piano, the lamp made a small steady sound.
“The law asks for everyone,” I said. “Leaving home and sleeping here doesn’t change that. If I don’t give particulars I am refusing, too. I want that understood.”
“Then we stand together,” Ada said.
“As far as we each choose.”
Ruth was staring at the form. “Will you put me in if I ask?”
“Yes.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I don’t know what the man will learn or put down himself. I can’t promise you won’t be found. I won’t say I didn’t know there were people here.”
Ada made a small movement, but Mrs Wetherby spoke before she could.
“That seems plain enough.”
“I should like to give my name,” Ruth said. Her face had turned white around the mouth. “I think I’d like to argue with people when they can see me.”
Dora nodded. It was an ordinary little nod, no great benediction, and it did more for the girl than a speech would have done.
Bessie put down her mending. “Mine too.”
Ada looked at her for a moment. Then she took her hand away from the paper.
Mrs Keene said, from beside the fire, “I was born in a place they’ve spelt wrong twice. You had better let me write it.”
Nell fetched the pen. We made no ceremony of those first entries. Each woman came to the table when she was ready, and I gave my own particulars in the large, upright hand Thomas used to say resembled a grocer’s price ticket. Nell paused at the question of occupation. I had begun to tell her what to write, then stopped.
She looked at me. I looked away first.
Later the others returned to the fire. Ada and Mrs Wetherby were composing their separate statement. Grace drew Ruth’s profile on the back of an envelope. Nell came to stand beside me at the table.
“You enjoyed tonight,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You can say it without thinking of a reason.”
There was affection in her voice, and exasperation. I laid the pen across the inkstand. My fingers were stained; I rubbed one thumb with the other, making them both worse.
“I don’t know if I have ever had an evening exactly like it.”
“Then perhaps you should have another.”
“With what everyone will say?”
Nell looked at the closed sitting-room door, beyond which the women were talking. “I am everyone too.”
By midnight we had put out the downstairs lamps. Bessie settled under her borrowed blanket in the back sitting room; Ruth took the folding bed, relieved beyond proportion that I had remembered her unstamped letter. Upstairs Nell knelt beside the little bed and unpinned her hat, which she had left on my dressing table.
“What did you put for your work?” I asked.
“I left it for the moment.”
“I would have put you down as helping me.”
She held a pin between her fingers. “Yes. I know.”
The wind moved against the window. There were people asleep in every part of my house, some who wanted to leave a record and some who wished to leave none. I had thought I understood what my daughter did because I saw her doing it every day.
She took the last pin from her hat and set it beside the others.
“Have you ever wanted something,” she asked, “that you couldn’t call a duty?”
I sat on the edge of my bed. For once there was nothing I could fetch for her.