Then he looked at her face in the window’s reflection. She was not composed. Not for these few seconds, alone in the room, when there was no one to see her. The face in the glass was the face she wore when nothing was required of her. He had seen it for the first time on the step, when the note arrived, and he was looking at it now in a reflection, and it was older and quieter than he had expected, and he felt something in him make a decision that had been a long time arriving.
He raised his hand and knocked.
She turned. The mask came back with the turning, automatic and complete, and she looked at him with the pleasant enquiring expression she brought to everything and he looked at it and thought:no. Not tonight.
“May I come in?” he said.
She said that of course he might. She gestured to the chair opposite. She said she was glad he was back, that she hoped the service had been a fitting tribute. Her voice was warm and even.
He came in. He did not sit in the chair opposite.
He crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside her writing desk, his back against the wall, his legs extended, in a posture that was unsuited to a drawing room and unsuited to a colonel, even a retired one, and he did not care about either of these things. He looked up at her.
She looked down at him and the mask flickered. Something younger appeared beneath it, startled and uncertain. She did not know what to do with this.
“He was a very good man,” Fitzwilliam said. “I liked him very much, which I am not sure I ever adequately told him, though I do believe he knew how much I respected him. I should have told him the whole of it.” He looked at his hands. “I met a woman this afternoon, at the house, after the cemetery. Mrs Caldecott, I believe, wife of General Caldecott. She said he spoke of you often. That he was very proud of what you had made of yourself.”
Lydia’s face was very still, but it was not unreadable. Her composure had cracked when he sat down on the floor, and her mask had not fitted quite back into place. He could see the grief in her eyes.
“I thought,” Fitzwilliam said, “that you should know that. That he talked of you often, and fondly, to those who knew him well. That it was said, even though you could not be there to hear it.”
The room was very quiet. The lamp threw a small, warm circle of light. Outside, January pressed against the window.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was uneven. “That is.” She stopped. “Thank you.”
He did not move from the floor. He had decided, in the corridor, that he was not going to manage this. He was going to sit here, on the floor of her sitting room, for as long as was needed, and he was not going to be useful or capable or correct, because none of those things had been worth a great deal to either of them so far.
She looked at him for a long moment: her husband, on the floor of her sitting room, with no apparent intention of moving. Her face did not change, but neither did the mask slip back over it. She sat there and looked at him, and let him see that she was feeling something.
She did not say anything further. Neither did he. But she did not ask him to leave, and he did not leave, and the lamp burned steadily between them, and outside the city went about its business in the dark.
