Temperance raised an eyebrow. “He remembered the bench.”
“He remembered everything,” Albina said. “That is the thing about him. You speak and he listens as though what you are saying is the only thing in the room worth attending to. I am not accustomed to that.”
“No,” Temperance said quietly. “I don’t suppose you are.”
Albina looked at her daughter and understood that there was more in those four words than Temperance intended to show, and she chose to let it sit where it was for now.
“Tell me what you think of him,” Albina said. “Honestly. You know him better than I do in some respects. He came here as your suitor, after all.”
“He came here as someone’s suitor,” Temperance said, with a slight smile. “I am not entirely sure it was ever mine.”
“Perhaps not,” Albina allowed. “But you spent time with him. You talked to him. What did you find?”
Temperance considered this with the genuine attention she gave to questions she was taking seriously. “I found that he was kind and he made me laugh, which is not nothing.”
“I see.”
“He is a good man,” Temperance said.
Albina nodded slowly, feeling the truth of this settle in her chest alongside everything else that had been settling there since the evening of the ball when Elias Talbot had stood in her drawing room and said what he said so simply and directly, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Can I ask you something?” Temperance said.
“You may always ask me something.”
“Are you frightened?”
Albina thought about this honestly, turning it over in the way she turned over things she wanted to answer properly. “A little, but not of him, I should say. He is not a frightening man. But of the whole of it. It has been a very long time since I allowed myself to want something like this. And wanting things, really wanting them, means that not having them costs something. I had rather forgotten what that felt like.”
“But you are willing to feel it?” Temperance said.
“I am more than willing,” Albina said. “That is what surprises me. I thought that at my age I would be more cautious, instead I am sitting here telling you that I have not slept properly in two days because I keep thinking about an oak tree in Dorset.”
Temperance laughed at that, properly, the warm genuine one that Albina had spent three years collecting and still found extraordinary every time.
“An oak tree?” Temperance said.
“He described it to me at the picnic,” Albina said, entirely unashamed. “For nearly twenty minutes. The age of it, the way the roots have spread, the particular quality of light it produces in late summer. And I sat there and listened to every word and thought that this man understands something about the world that I understand too, which is that the best things are old and rooted and have been there long enough to be impressive.” She paused. “And then I thought that I was being very fanciful about an oak tree and that I ought to pay attention to the sandwiches.”
“And did you?”
“I did not,” Albina admitted. “I kept thinking about the tree.”
They sat together in the quiet morning sitting room, and the tea was warm and the light was good and outside the garden moved gently in a small breeze that had come up from the south. Temperance was looking at her mother with the expression she had when she was feeling something she was not going to name directly, and Albina looked back at her and felt, for what seemed like the thousandth time in three years, the particular extraordinary warmth of being known by this person.
“I want to say something to you,” Albina said.
“All right,” Temperance said.
“I spent thirty years in a life that was not mine,” Albina said. “Not because anyone put a gun to my head, but because I was twenty-two and I did not know what mine was supposed to look like, and I made the sensible choice and I lived inside it and I told myself for a very long time that sensible was enough.” She looked at Temperance steadily. “It is not enough. I want you to know that, from someone who has been inside a sensible life for a very long time. It keeps the cold out, but only barely.”
Temperance was quiet.
“One must not stop living,” Albina said. “That is what I have learned, at considerable cost and rather later than I would have liked. One must not stop living simply because one is no longer young, or because life has been unkind, or because it feels safer to want nothing than to want something and risk not having it.” She paused. “The risk is worth it. I am quite certain of that now.”
“You are certain after two days?” Temperance said, gently.
“I am certain after forty-six years,” Albina said. “Two days simply confirmed it. Now, tell me what you think I should say when he calls on Thursday?”
