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suddenly rose with a
severe, judicial look, and grabbed hold of the table to stop the world
spinning. ‘I think, by the by, I shall go for a walk along the Walks.’
    Wanderingly, he went.
Susannah followed, all tolerant fondness of male exuberance. Lydia sat on,
rather more rigid than she wanted to be, reflecting on the way the people
closest to us are able so effortlessly to thrust us to the farthest distance.
    ‘All head and no heart,’
Lydia repeated. ‘What would you say to that, Mr Hanley?’
    ‘Oh, lots of things:
because, of course, as you reminded me this evening, there is nothing more
important in the world than talking about you — except that at the time you was me. Or were. This is becoming dismally grammatical.’ He called
for the bill. ‘Shall we go and hear the music?’
    He was, perhaps,
slightly bored with her, as she was with him. The result of understanding
without sympathy. They squeezed into the Rotunda, where to her intense
gratitude a string orchestra was playing: no singers. She had had enough of the
human voice. The Allegro was in B flat major, with a subsidiary theme in
the relative dominant. Because I know this, does it mean I don’t enjoy it? Head
not heart. Listening to those shimmering complex sounds, it seemed to her that
both were present. Surely that was the ideal. Surely one should not have to sacrifice
one for the other.
    And surely she could
escape going to Bath. One simply said no — just as she had said no to Lewis
Durrant all those years ago: and then one lifted free, buoyed on the cool
current of decision, untrammelled by the cords of regret.
Chapter V
    Heystead.’ Lydia sighed;
and settled herself back against the biscuit-thin upholstery of the post-chaise
as it skimmed out of the yard of the White Bear in Piccadilly. Which jarred her
spine and rattled her teeth: it was better to sit forward until you were off
the cobbles. No matter, though, because it was really Heystead that she was
leaning back against. Heystead, her cushion.
    ‘Heystead,’ said Mary
Darber. The way she uttered it suggested the dropping of a heavy stone into a
deep brackish well.
    Mary was Lydia’s maid —
meaning she was a servant at Heystead, who always accompanied Lydia on her
annual visit to London because no respectable woman, not even one as
independent-minded as Lydia, could do such a thing quite alone. As Lydia
required very little fussing about hair or dress, there was not much for Mary
to do during the two-month sojourn at Queen Anne Street: so she passed the time
by falling in love. Being young and startlingly handsome, she had no difficulty
in accomplishing this each year. The tender victim this time was, Lydia
understood, a bookbinder’s apprentice from nearby Bentinck Street.
    ‘You’re sorry to be
going home, Mary?’
    Listlessly Mary examined
her fingernails. ‘Oh, I shall get used to it.’
    These loves were intense,
difficult, stirring. Too stirring, Lydia had feared at first, and kept an eye
on Mary’s waistline: but the girl seemed to know what she was about. And hints
that the family might help her to a job in London, rather than break her
romance, had been indifferently received. The parting, Lydia began to see, was
the thing. Two months of the year were consecrated to passion: the rest of the
time Mary was rational and comfortable. It seemed to Lydia a sensible solution.
There was only the painful transition from one state to another, from town to
country, to be got over. London made Mary very smart and quick in her manner.
‘Lord, ma’am, only look at that,’ she cried, rousing herself to stare out of
the window as they waited at the Islington turnpike. ‘Did you ever see such a
frightful old dowd? Surely no one has worn their hair dressed high like that
these fifteen years. Not in town, at least.’ She sank back with another sigh,
expressive of her reminded doom: return to the rustic world where dowds and frights
were in the majority. Lydia patiently commiserated.