I had not, before that morning, fully understood how publicly I had been kept ignorant. ”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Eleanor poured herself more coffee.
Her hand did not shake. He noticed her wedding ring had been taken off and set beside the saucer, catching the morning light. “I have not come to a decision about you,” she said. “I have come to a decision about myself.
I will no longer be a woman who pretends. I was trained for it from the age of twelve. I have at last reached the end of my appetite for the practice. ”
She turned a page of the ledger without looking down.
“I have moved your belongings into the south room. That is temporary. I have written to your mother. She will arrive on Thursday.
The girls are with their governess. They do not yet know anything has occurred. I intend to behave at meals as I have always behaved. I intend that you should do the same.
”
He nodded. He thought of his daughters, the elder six, the younger four. The elder’s face when she asked him in February whether he had been ill because she had not seen him at breakfast for a long time. He had said dukes were like cats and slept where they pleased.
She had not laughed. “I have changed our wills,” Eleanor said. “Not in any way that disinherits you. I have set aside in trust a portion for the girls.
Not for their dowries. For them. The trust is in my brother’s name and mine. You are not a trustee.
You will not be consulted. ” She paused. “I have also altered the disposition of my own portion. The portion that came with me.
”
He set his cup down. The coffee had cooled into a thin dark mirror. “Eleanor,” he said. The first time he had said her name aloud in the room.
She looked up. She did not soften. She did not harden. She met him the way a lake meets a stone, accepting the disturbance without becoming it.
“Not yet,” she said. “You will want to explain, and I will want to listen, and we are neither of us in a condition to do either well. Eat something. Go upstairs.
Wash. Change your shirt. Sleep if you can. We will speak again at three.
”
She rose. She picked up the ring from the saucer, considered it for a moment, and slipped it into her pocket. Not because she meant to wear it again, but because she did not intend to leave it lying about for the maids to discuss. At the door, she turned.
“One more thing. I do not wish you to call upon Mrs. Caro today. I wish it for yours.
You are not in a state to make decisions in that house this morning. Today, please, be still. ”
She left. The door did not slam.
He sat for a long time in the chair he had sat in for six years, watching the steam rise off the coffee he had not drunk. He went upstairs by the back stairs. The south room had been prepared with brisk impartial kindness: his brushes laid out, a clean shirt, a small posy of hyacinths on the writing desk. He sat on the edge of the strange bed and put his face in his hands.
He thought of his father, who had been a less faithful man, and his mother who had endured it with polished grief he had mistaken for serenity. He understood now that he had been careless about the only thing Eleanor had ever truly asked of him: that he should not let her be the last to know. He had let the florist know. He had let the staff at St.
James’s Square know. He had let the woman at Bond Street know. He had let everyone know but Eleanor. He had not been kind.
He had been comfortable. The two had become in his hands the same word. He rose. He washed.
He changed his shirt. He did not sleep. He sat at the writing desk and watched a gardener tying back a climbing rose that had pulled away from its trellis. He took up a pen and wrote his wife’s name at the top of a sheet of paper, then stopped.
He did not yet know what he intended to say. At three in the south drawing room, they met again. She carried a small leather folder. She had changed her shoes.
That was the only alteration. “I am ready to listen, if you are ready to speak,” she said. “I will not interrupt. I will not contradict.
I will not pretend to a feeling I do not have. I will also not weep. ”
He told her the truth. About the house in St.
James’s Square. About the necklace. About the florist. About the morning in February he had not known she endured.
He told her he had believed himself discreet and saw now he had been only sheltered. He told her he had taken her steadiness for indifference and her competence for forgiveness, and that he was sorry in a way he understood to be useless to her. He did not ask to be forgiven. He understood that to ask would be to insult her again.
She let the silence hold. Then she opened the folder. Inside were three sheets of paper in her even hand. She rested her hand on them.
She said she had not yet decided what kind of marriage they would have. She would not be hurried. She did not wish at present to live separately. She did not wish to live as they had lived.
The south room was to remain his until she said otherwise. He was free to refuse and leave. But if he stayed, he was to stay on her terms. She would set them out in writing within the week.
She said there would be no more discussion of Mrs. Caro between them. Ever. What he chose to do about her was his to choose, and the consequences his to live with.
She would not be required to hear of it again. He said he understood. “The girls are to know nothing for the present,” she said, looking at the fire. “Except that we are very busy and their grandmother is coming and the household is being rearranged because it had grown untidy.
I will not have them grow up in a house where their parents lie to each other about important things in front of them. I would like for us to find a way to be in a room with them together that is not a performance. ”
“I would like to try,” he said. “Then we will try.
”
She rose, gathered her folder. At the door she paused. She said she would see him at dinner. That his mother would arrive Thursday.
That there was a letter from his steward on his desk which required an answer. She had taken the liberty of opening it because the seal had been broken in the post. She had not read past the first paragraph. Then she was gone.
The weeks that followed were not dramatic. His mother arrived Thursday, stayed nine days, asked no questions. The household settled into its new shape. The locks were not mentioned again.
The south room acquired a row of books, a pair of slippers, a small framed drawing by the elder daughter of a horse that did not entirely resemble a horse. Mrs. Caro received a letter in his own hand. What was in it was no one’s business but theirs.
The house in St. James’s Square was given up. The necklace from Bond Street found its way to a hospital for foundling children, sold, the sum endowing two beds in the children’s ward. His mother, before she left, sat with him in the library and said she had loved his father very much, and that loving him had cost her things she did not intend to enumerate.
She hoped he would be a less expensive husband than his father had been, because his wife was a finer woman and deserved a less expensive man. She kissed him on the forehead and went up to bed. They did not fall in love again in the way the world likes to imagine. They became, by slow degrees, a man and a woman who could be in a room together without performing.
He learned to ask her opinion on the estate and to take it. She learned to give it without softening it first. They argued occasionally in low voices in the south drawing room, and the arguments were resolved or not, and either outcome was bearable because neither was pretending any longer. One evening in late autumn, two years after the morning of the locks, he came in from the stables with his hair damp from rain and found her by the fire in the small library reading a letter from her brother.
She looked up. She said her brother was coming for Christmas and would bring his new wife. He sat down opposite her. He said he would be glad to see them.
She nodded. After a moment, without looking up, she reached across the small table between them and rested her hand briefly on the back of his. She did not hold it. She withdrew it after a breath and turned the page.
He sat very still. He understood that this was what he had been given in place of the other thing. He understood it was enough. He understood he had not earned it exactly and would go on not exactly earning it for the rest of his life.
And that the going on was the point. Outside the rain quieted. A log shifted in the grate.
Somewhere upstairs a child’s voice called for her mother and her mother answered and the voice was satisfied and did not call again.