A Letter

The post came at half past ten, which it did when the round was running late, and Margot heard the flap go and the soft slap of it landing on the mat before she had finished the sentence she was writing. She left the sentence. The morning had given her nothing else to do; a man in Harrogate had asked the price of a Bewick she did not have, and the kettle had gone cold twice. She came round the counter and gathered the post off the mat in both hands the way you do when half of it is going to be rubbish.

A bill from the framers. The wholesaler's autumn catalogue, fat and glossy and a fortnight too late to be useful. A reminder about the chimney sweep. And, at the bottom, where it had slid because the heavy paper outweighed the rest, one cream envelope.

She knew it was different before she knew why. It was the weight of it, and the colour, not white but the colour of clotted cream, stiff enough to stand on its edge. Her name across the front in fountain pen, the real thing, the ink gone slightly brown where the nib had pressed and paler where it had lifted. Margot Reade. No address; it had been put through the door by a hand, not the round. And on the back, holding the flap, a disc of wax the dark green of a yew in shadow, pressed with a device she turned to the window to read and could not.

She carried it to the counter and looked at it under the lamp. A small low bridge of three arches, she thought, with an upright at either end, and a ring around the whole of it, the green sunk into the grain of the wax and the gold of the high points catching where the seal had bitten. It was not a crest she knew, and she knew most of the ones that came through a trade like hers. The paper fibres had caught at the edge of the wax and torn a little when it set. She ran her thumb across it, the cool of the wax and the slight tooth of it, and felt, for no reason she could have given, that she ought to be careful with it.

She slid her thumb under the flap and the wax cracked off the paper and dropped on the counter in one green coin, and she put it aside without thinking and opened the single folded sheet inside.

Dinner on the 14th at Glebe Court. Hugh hopes you will come. Do.

H.

That was all of it. Three lines and the one letter, in the upright hand she had watched write a cheque across this same counter three weeks ago, the same certainty in the downstrokes. No time named, though she understood she was meant to know it. No telephone number, no line about looking forward, none of the soft furniture other people put round an invitation to make it sit comfortably. Do. The word did a small thing to the back of her neck.

She read it again. Then she folded it back along its crease and slid it into the envelope and stood the envelope against the lamp on the till counter, where she could see it, and went back to the Bewick she did not have and the man in Harrogate.

She came back to the letter twice in the next hour. The first time she only looked at it. The second time she took it out and read it again, as though the three lines might have rearranged themselves in the envelope, and they had not, and she put it back and was cross with herself for a moment, and then was not.

At lunchtime she wrote the reply.

She did it on her own paper, the cream laid she kept for client letters, and she wrote it in pen, because it would have been wrong to type it and she knew that without being able to say how she knew. She wrote three lines and signed one letter, because that was the register the thing had come in at and she found she could match it.

I will. Thank Helena. M.

She addressed the envelope, and stopped with the pen above it, and did not write Helena Lambert, and did not write Hugh Carrington, because the letter had been signed H and posted by a hand and asked her to a house and not to a person. She wrote The Hosts, Glebe Court, and the village under it, and thought it looked right, and did not let herself wonder too long why she was sure of a form nobody had taught her.

She put her coat on, the dark green wool, and went out into the square and posted it at the box on the corner before she could think better of any of it, and the iron mouth took it with a small dull clap and that was done. The day was bright and cold, the stone fronts doing their honey thing. The woman from the cheese stall lifted a hand to her across the square, and Margot lifted one back, and went in out of the cold.

Tom came in at twenty to four.

She heard the bell and looked up from the catalogue and there he was, holding the door a moment against the wind before he let it shut, smiling the smile that had always been the difficulty with Tom. He was dressed too well for a man who had been writing in a damp cottage all day. A good coat, a scarf he had clearly chosen, the look of someone who had decided, somewhere on the road, to make this seem like nothing.

'I was driving back from the other side of the hill,' he said, 'and I thought, she's in here, and I have never once seen the shop, and that is a failure of friendship I can put right in ten minutes.' He looked around it, properly, the way a writer looks at a room he might use. 'Oh, it's lovely. It's exactly you. Green to the rail and the smell of the thing.'

'It was a cheese shop. On wet days it still owns up to it.'

'Better and better.' He came to the counter and did not lean on it, which she noticed, because men who came to flirt leaned on the counter and Tom held himself a courteous foot off it. He picked up nothing. He looked at the shelf behind her, where the better stock stood, and then at her. 'What's the thing you won't sell? Everyone like you has one.'

She found, slightly to her own surprise, that she did not want to show him the Thornton she had been thinking of, or anything else. She gave him a county flora instead, a pretty thing, safe. He took it and turned the pages with hands that knew how, praised it, put it down, and asked about the column.

'It starts after Christmas,' she said. 'Country Life. Nine hundred words a month on whatever I like, which is the trap, because whatever I like turns out to be very hard to make interesting to anyone who doesn't already like it.'

'You'll be good at it. You've got the thing the rest of us have to fake, which is that you actually care about the object.' He said it warmly and it was true and she let it sit. He picked the flora back up and put it down again, restless in the way of a man working round to something, and she watched him do it and waited, because she had learned, lately, without quite noticing she was learning it, the value of waiting.

'Have you met Hugh Carrington yet?' he said.

He said it lightly, looking at the flora and not at her, his thumb on the corner of the board. It was the lightness that told her. A man asking an idle question does not arrange his face for the answer, and Tom, for half a second, had arranged his.

'I've met Hugh Carrington,' she said.

And then she said nothing else. She did not say where, or when, or that there had been a long table and candles before dark and a woman called Imogen who had driven from Burford on a rumour, or that a man called Felix had come up the drive uninvited and put his rosé on the table and his eyes on her and not taken either back. She did not lie. She said the true thing, which was four words long, and she let it lie there between them on the counter, and she watched Tom understand that he was not going to be given the rest.

He took it well, which was the other difficulty with Tom. He smiled, and let the flora go, and the small tension went out of his shoulders as though he had decided this round did not count. 'Good,' he said. 'He's worth knowing. Restored a thing of mine once and only charged me half what it was worth, which in that world is practically a love letter.' He reached into the bag on his shoulder and put a book on the counter, his own, The Cold Larder, the hardback, and opened the cover, and she saw he had already signed it, in the car or before he came, the ink dry. For Margot, who knew me before the book. T. 'A bribe,' he said. 'For nothing in particular. Come and have lunch when the cottage stops being damp, which the man says will be never.'

'Thank you, Tom.' She meant the thanks and not the lunch. He heard the difference and was too well mannered to mind it. She watched him go to the door.

'You look well,' he said, with his hand on the latch, where the woman with the dog had stood three weeks ago, saying almost the same thing in almost the same place. 'Stow suits you. I'm glad I didn't believe it until I'd seen it.' The bell went. He was gone across the square with his good scarf, not looking back, and she stood with his book under her hand, the four words she had said to him going round quietly in her, I've met Hugh Carrington, and the cleanness of having stopped there.

In Painswick, in a house that had three more rooms than she now had reasons to go into, Caroline Mercer sat at the kitchen table with the phone held a little away from her ear and let the bursar finish.

'Of course,' she said, when he had. 'No, I quite understand. The autumn term, by the end of the month. Yes.' Her voice was level and warm and exactly right, the voice she had used for thirty years on people she needed something from. 'It's only the timing, with one or two things completing late this side of Christmas. If there were any flexibility at all on the date, it would be a kindness. But I do understand if not.' She listened. 'Thank you. You've been very good.' She listened again. 'And Sophie's well? She doesn't say much to me on the telephone. They don't, at that age.' A small laugh, the right size. 'No. Thank you. Goodbye.'

She put the phone down on the scrubbed wood and sat with both hands flat on the table and did not move for a while. The kitchen was the warmest room and the one she lived in now, the rest of the house gone over to dust sheets in her head if not yet in fact. Outside, the long garden she paid a man to keep dropped away toward the valley, and Painswick stood grey-gold on the hill opposite, the wool churches and the great black yews, and she did not look at it.

After a while she got up and walked through the house. She did it sometimes, in the afternoons, the way you press a bruise. The drawing room with the curtains she had made and the furniture she had chosen for a life that had more people in it. The dining room where she had given dinners the right people had wanted to be at. The morning room at the front, cold, the desk in the window.

She opened the long drawer of the desk. The diary was where it always was, the old-fashioned kind, a week to a view, the leather gone soft at the corners. She turned to October. To the fourteenth.

The page was blank.

There had been years when this page would have been the centre of the month, filled a fortnight in advance in her own hand, the where and the with-whom, a dinner she would have been asked to and seated well at and remembered fondly for. She knew, without anyone having told her, that the dinner was happening. She could have named the house. She looked at the white of the page until it stopped meaning anything, and then she closed the diary.

Beside it in the drawer, where her hand knew to find it without looking, lay a small brooch. Green and gold, a low bridge of three arches in dark enamel within a worn gold ring. She had worn it sixteen years. She did not pick it up. She looked at it lying there on the baize, and then she pushed the drawer shut on it, slowly, until the catch took, and she stood in the cold morning room with her hand still on the brass pull and did not cry, because she had found that crying used something up she might need later, and she had less of everything now than she used to.

Margot closed the shop early.

She did it on impulse, at quarter past four, turning the card to Closed with an hour of trade still in the day and not minding, and she did not go up to the flat. She put the green coat back on and went out and walked north, up the lane that climbs out of the top of the town past the last of the houses and the allotments and onto the open hill, where the hedges drop away and the fields run out long and pale toward the Windrush.

She walked for the better part of an hour and met no one. The light was doing the thing it only did in October and only for forty minutes, coming in low and gold across the stubble so that every blade threw a shadow and the whole field seemed to be made of light lying on its side. Sheep moved off ahead of her without hurry. A buzzard went over and was mobbed by something smaller and bore it without comment. The cold got into her at last and she did not mind it.

She had not walked like this, all the way out of her own thoughts and back into them changed, since London, where she had walked to outpace a thing that would not be outpaced. This was the other kind. The kind where the walking is not running from anything but toward something she could not see the shape of yet. For the first time in a long while her mind was facing forward. The fourteenth sat in it like a lit window at the end of a dark lane. She did not have words for what was happening to her, and she did not reach for them. She had been chosen, she thought, for something. That was as near as she came, and the rest she let alone, the way you let alone a bird that has come close, holding still so as not to send it up.

The letter was in her pocket. She had not meant to bring it; she had not, either, left it on the counter when she could have. She had carried it out without deciding to. As a child she had once carried a thing of her grandmother's from room to room, for no reason except that it was hers.

At the top, where the lane gave out at a gate and the land fell away, she stopped.

The whole valley lay under her, going from gold to grey as she watched, the river a brighter line through the low fields, a single light already on in a farm a mile off. Stow was behind and below her, the church tower holding the last of it. She stood at the gate with her hands in her pockets and the cold coming up off the grass, and the wind moved the hedge and went on, and somewhere down the hill a dog was being called in for the night, the name carrying thin and clear across the fields and then not.

She took the letter out and looked at it, the cream of it nearly grey now in the failing light, her own name across the front in the certain hand she knew now. She did not open it. She knew what it said. She folded it once against the lining of the pocket, the way one folds a thing one means to keep, and put it back. She stood there a long time, until the gold was all gone out of the valley and the first cold stars stood over the far hill. Then she turned and went back down toward the lights of the town.