Glebe Court

The lane to Glebe Court went on longer than a lane to a house ought to, narrowing between high banks until Margot was sure she had it wrong, and then it opened without warning onto gravel and a Jacobean front the colour of an old biscuit, and a fat spaniel came down off the steps to meet the Mercedes as though it had spent the whole afternoon waiting for this exact car. She parked where the gravel told her to, beside Helena's Volvo and two others, and sat a moment gathering herself before the gathering could turn into nerves.

The house was the kind that looks wrong in a photograph because no single angle holds it. Tall chimneys, mullioned windows going gold with the last of the afternoon, a porch you could have led a horse through. The spaniel leaned its whole weight against her shins and then lost interest entirely and went to be sick, discreetly, into a lavender bush.

'You came up the long way,' said a man from the porch. 'Everyone does the first time; the map sends you round by the farm. Come in, and don't dawdle in the hall, it is the coldest room in England.'

It was Hugh. She had met him once, at the next table at the Sherborne Arms, and he greeted her now with the warmth of a long friendship, though they had met exactly once. 'We met,' he said. 'In passing. You were patient with Antonia, which not everyone is.' He had a glass of something in one hand and gave her the other, and his fingers were stained black at the tips, and on the smallest of them sat the worn signet she had seen at lunch and thought nothing of.

The hall was as cold as advertised and they did not dawdle in it. Hugh went off to find the folios, calling back that she was to be given tea and on no account allowed to leave before she had seen the library, and Margot was handed instead to a tall, soft-spoken man in an apron who said his name was Sam and made tea in a kitchen that ran the whole back of the house.

Sam Page was easy in the manner of a man who had spent a career listening and had decided he liked it better than talking. He asked her about the shop and the move, and listened to the answers, which is rarer in a man than the asking. When she turned it round he told her he saw patients in Cirencester three days a week and cooked the other four, and that Hugh's idea of helping in the kitchen was to come in every twenty minutes and eat something and offer an opinion on the seasoning.

'He carves, though,' Sam said. 'I'll give him that. His grandfather carved and his godmother carved and he was raised to it like a trade.' He set out cups, and as he reached past her for the milk his cuff turned back and the link in it caught the light, a small dark enamel thing she took for a family crest and did not look at twice. 'They'll all be very nice to you tonight,' he added, not unkindly, pouring. 'Don't let it turn your head. They're nice to everyone Helena likes, and she likes almost no one, so when she does it comes out rather concentrated.'

'Should I be flattered or frightened?'

'Both,' Sam said. 'In moderation. Milk?' He poured before she answered, having decided she was a milk person and being right about it. He had, the whole time, the air of a man quietly taking the temperature of a new arrival and keeping the reading to himself.

The library was off the hall to the left, a long low room that smelled of leather and woodsmoke and the particular dust of books that are read and not merely kept. Helena was there, in a chair by the window with a book open and unregarded on her knee, and she looked up at Margot with what Margot was learning to read as the nearest she came to plain pleasure.

A second woman stood at the shelves with her back to the room. She turned as Margot came in, and was, simply, beautiful, in the unhurried fashion of a woman who has been looked at all her life and long ago stopped being startled by it.

'This is Imogen,' Hugh said, coming in behind Margot with a folio held flat in both hands. 'A great friend who knows about everything I don't, which is most things, and who has driven all the way from Burford on the strength of a rumour that you exist.'

'He exaggerates,' said Imogen, taking Margot's hand in both of hers and keeping it a moment. 'I came for his cellar and stayed for you. Helena has been very mysterious about you, which is how you know she likes someone; she goes vague over the things she minds about.' The cuff of her blouse was embroidered in a dark thread, a small figure repeated along the hem that Margot's eye crossed as it crosses any pattern. 'You have the bookshop. I shall be insufferable. I have a thing I write, online, and half of it is telling people what to read, and now I shall simply tell them all to go to you and ruin your quiet life.'

'She has more readers than the books do,' Hugh said comfortably, and laid the folio on the table under the window. 'Now. Tell me I was right.'

It was a Thornton, the Temple of Flora, the great absurd masterpiece of the form, the flowers painted against their melodramatic skies as though each were the heroine of its own opera, and Margot forgot the room for a moment and bent over it and was, briefly, entirely happy. The second folio was a Vitruvius Britannicus, Hugh's country more than hers, and they fell to arguing pleasantly about whether he had paid too much, and Helena watched the pair of them across the open book and said almost nothing, and Imogen watched Helena watching, and the afternoon turned without anyone deciding it should toward the evening.

They drifted, as people drift in a comfortable house, from the library toward the long dining room at the back, where Sam was setting a table by candlelight though it was barely dark. The talk ranged easily, the talk of people who have known one another a long time and are glad of a new pair of ears to do it for. Hugh told a story about the acquisitions committee he sat on at the National Gallery, and a picture nobody else wanted that he had fought for and lost, and was still cross about. Imogen described a piece she had published that week and the particular people it had annoyed, and made the annoyance sound like a public service. Helena told a story about a client that had all the shape of a good story and not one fact you could have repeated, because she gave no name, no place, and no date, and it was somehow the better for it.

Beyond the dining room's far windows, in the dregs of the light, Margot could make out a glass room built onto the back of the house, an orangery, its door shut, the pale shapes of citrus standing in pots inside. She took it in as you take in a room you are not going to be in, and turned back to the candles, and forgot it.

Headlights swept the drive as they were about to sit down.

'That,' said Hugh, not turning round, 'will be Felix, who was not asked, and who has never once allowed that to stop him.'

He came in on a draught of cold air and woodsmoke, dark-haired, lean, a bottle in one hand and a face wearing an apology that was not quite an apology. 'I heard there was a dinner,' he said. 'I've brought my own to pay for the cheek of arriving at it.' He put the bottle down, his own rosé, the one even Margot had seen written up in the weekend pages, and pulled off his jacket and hung it over the back of the empty chair, and as it swung the inside of the lapel turned once to the candlelight and showed a small enamel pin she had no time to make anything of before the jacket settled and covered it again. His hands, when he reached for the glass Sam had already poured him, were a working man's hands, brown and used.

He took the empty chair across from Margot, because it was the empty one, and looked at her, and said, 'Margot,' as though her name were a thing he already had some use for. Then he did not look away, and she discovered, to her mild alarm, that she was in no hurry for him to.

'You two haven't met,' Hugh said, sitting.

'No,' said Felix, still looking at her. 'We haven't.'

Dinner was lamb, and very good, and lasted. Margot could not afterwards have given a full account of it, only of pieces, the way you keep pieces of an evening that mattered before you knew it would. Imogen at the centre of the table, turning the talk so that everyone in turn was funny and no one was stranded. Hugh carving at the head, the signet flashing as he worked. Helena saying little and being deferred to regardless, so that the little she said arrived weighted.

They spoke, the five of them, in a shorthand she could follow the warmth of and not the substance. There had been a weekend somewhere that two of them had been to and two had not, and a near-disaster with a marquee, and a person called Antonia, whom Margot had now met, and a person called Rupert, whom she had not, and who seemed to be the one they were all fond of and none of them quite trusted. Nobody explained. Nobody made her feel the want of explanation. She understood, without rancour and without quite framing it, that she was the reason they were all being so very good tonight, and that the goodness was real for all that, and after a while she stopped trying to hold the two facts apart and simply ate, and laughed, and was happy.

'You cook,' she said to Felix, because he had asked Sam, twice now, what he had done to the sauce, and had listened to the answers like a man taking dictation.

'Badly, and only when something's wrong,' Felix said. 'It's the one thing that makes me stand still. Sam cooks because he's good at it. I cook the way other men go for a run.' He turned his glass by the stem. 'What do you do, when something's wrong?'

'I walk,' she said. 'For hours. I walked half of London before I left it.'

'And here?'

'Here there is more to walk and less wrong, so far.'

'So far,' he agreed, and there was something in the two words she could not read and did not entirely want explained, and Imogen, from the far end, said his name, 'Felix,' lightly, the way you call a dog off a thing, and he smiled and let the conversation be taken back.

Once, when the talk ran ahead of her into people she did not know, Helena leaned in and named them under it, two words each, so quietly it was plainly a kindness meant for no one else to hear: who Antonia was, whose marquee it had been, why it had mattered. Margot understood that she was being looked after, and that being looked after by Helena was not a small thing to be handed, and she took care not to show how much she felt it.

'You must come to one of my Fridays,' Imogen said to Margot, over the cheese. 'In Burford. I cook for a few people and I watch what happens to them. You would be good at it; you listen, which most people only pretend to do while they wait to talk.' She did not say what the Fridays were beyond dinner, and Margot, who four days ago might have asked, did not, because she had begun to learn, without choosing to, that in this house you did not ask. You waited, and were told, or you were not.

At the Wild Rabbit, in Kingham, Tom Brennan was eating early at the bar, alone, which he preferred and pretended not to.

He had the fish and a glass he had made a small performance of choosing, and he was turning over, in the loose way he turned things when he was not yet working, the bookseller in Stow who had answered his email in three warm lines and given him nothing inside them. Through the window the lane behind the pub ran off into the dark toward nowhere he could have put a name to, and a car came along it unhurried, a tidy old Volvo estate he half believed he had seen somewhere recently and could not place, its tail-lights steadying as it took the bend for the Bibury road.

He watched it out of sight. He could not have told anyone why he watched it. It was a feeling he had learned to trust and had not yet learned to use, that a thing he had just seen would turn out to matter. The lane went nowhere on any map he had ever looked at, which in this country generally meant it went somewhere that was not on the map. He had nothing to write down, so he wrote nothing down, and went back to his fish, and was annoyed with himself, mildly, for the rest of the meal.

By the second hour the candles had burned down into themselves and the talk had gone quiet and good, the stage of an evening at which people say truer things, or nothing at all.

Margot reached for the salt.

Felix's hand was already going to it, or had been waiting near it, and it crossed hers on the way, the backs of his fingers against the backs of hers, half a second, no longer. He did not snatch the hand back, which a man pretending to an accident would have done. He did not press, which a man wanting to be caught would have done. He closed his fingers round the little silver cellar and set it into her hand, so that for a moment they both held it, and he had not once stopped looking at her since he sat down.

'Salt,' he said.

'Thank you,' she said, and her hand was steady, which she was glad of that night and a little unsettled by afterwards.

The candles had burned to the silver. The talk had gone on to something else, Imogen and Hugh disputing a date, Helena with her chin on her hand watching the two of them argue. Margot kept her hand where it was, around the cool of the salt, and did not look at the orangery, and did not look at Felix, and looked instead at the candles, which had nothing to tell her and asked nothing of her in return.