The house was very quiet.
He had thought himself familiar with that. He had sat in quiet rooms before and believed himself to understand what they contained, had been through it once, had managed it, had told himself that made him something like an expert on the subject of loss and its specific qualities. He had been, he now understood, a man who had confused acquaintance with understanding.
What he had felt when Clarissa left had been real. He was not inclined to dismiss it entirely. It had been real in the way that wounds are real, the pain of it genuine, the recovery slow enough to feel significant. But it had been, underneath everything, the wound of a man whose pride had been injured and whose narrative about himself had been disrupted.
The wound of someone who had believed a story and discovered the story was not true. He had healed from it with less difficulty than he had expected, which he had attributed at the time to his own resilience and now understood differently. He recovered readily from the things that had not, in fact, reached him.
Here was a wound that had reached him.
He became aware of it by degrees, standing in the hallway after the sound of the carriage had faded entirely, after the house had settled into its new configuration. The configuration of a house with one fewer person in it, a fact that was making itself felt in every room simultaneously, in the quality of the air, in the silence that was not the ordinary silence of a quiet afternoon but something else, something with a shape to it, an absence with edges.
He had grown accustomed to her. He knew this now with the clarity of someone who had been denied the thing and could therefore measure, for the first time, the exact dimensions of what they had been taking for granted. To the quality of her attention at dinner, the way she pursued a subject not to fill time but because she was genuinely interested in where it went.
To the arguments—the arguments, which had been the best conversations he had had in years—which had made him think in ways he had not thought before, and which had ended half the time with her laughing at her own logic and the other half with him retreating to his study to work out whether she had been right.
Because she frequently had been. To the garden walks that had not been walks about the garden at all, but had been, he understood now, the closest he had come to saying something real to her, yet had failed at even that.
He owed her a great deal.
Chapter 31
The carriage was in the drive when Genevieve arrived.
Not Thomas's carriage. Not her parents'. She saw it from the gate and registered it without understanding it for a moment, piled improbably high with luggage, a hatbox roped precariously to the top, a maid directing a footman with the harried authority of someone who had been directing footmen all morning and had not found them equal to the task.
A trunk was being secured to the back with a length of rope that did not appear equal to the task either. The whole arrangement had the slightly chaotic quality of a departure that had been decided on quickly and was being executed before anyone changed their mind.
The carriage she had been in pulled up next to it.
She had not anticipated finding the carriage in the drive.
Then she looked at the figure descending the front steps.
Clarissa was dressed for travel, which on Clarissa meant she was dressed beautifully, because Clarissa was always dressed beautifully. Because beauty was one of the instruments she had learned to wield early and had never seen reason to set down. She was pulling on her gloves with the focused efficiency of a woman in the middle of a departure, and she had not yet seen Genevieve, and for a moment Genevieve simply looked at her.
Clarissa looked up.
The surprise on her face was genuine. That was something, at least, a crack in the composure that was real rather than performed, the involuntary quality of an expression that had not been arranged in advance.
"Genevieve." She recovered quickly. She always recovered quickly. "I did not know you were coming back today."
"Evidently." Genevieve said as she stepped down and looked at the carriage, at the quantity of luggage strapped to its roof. "Are you leaving?"
"Mother and I have had a difference of opinion." Clarissa's tone was pleasant in the way that her tones were always pleasant when she was being careful, smooth and uninflected, giving nothing away. "I thought it better to remove myself before the difference became a scene."
"Where will you go?"
"I have friends." She returned to her gloves. "I always have somewhere to go."
This was true. It had always been true. Clarissa had always had somewhere to go, had always had a circle arranged around herself with the unconscious competence of a woman who understood that social currency was its own variety of security, and had invested in it accordingly. Genevieve had found this admirable once. She was not sure now what she found it.
Her mother had appeared at the top of the front steps, wisely remaining there, wearing the expression of a woman who has done everything she could and was prepared to observe what happened next. The footman had stopped pretending to arrange luggage and was examining the middle distance with dedicated concentration.
"Come inside for a moment," Genevieve said.
"I was rather on my way—"
"Clarissa." She said it quietly, without addition. Just the name, with everything she meant underneath it.