Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ direct. Remembering to look modestly down at my hands again, I found they weren’t where I’d left them. My fingers were plucking at my brooch. To cover my embarrassment, I took the whole thing off and put it down on the table.

      She shook her head, and a little smile appeared on her face, like a fisherman’s look as he starts playing the fish he knows is hooked at the end of his line. She bit her lip, then looked up at me, with her demurest public look. ‘He said he would love to see the new house. He said he’d come and visit us.’

      I waited. I’d gone too far. I wasn’t going to ask when. I concentrated on the sunlight in the garden.

      The silence unsettled her. ‘He was asking after you, actually,’ she went on, unwilling to let go, and under the flirtatious eyelashes sweeping her cheeks I could sense anxious, watchful eyes. ‘That was when he said he’d come and see us.’

      ‘Oh,’ I replied, feeling my heart secretly leap, and suddenly confident too that I could get off the hook of her questions. I shrugged, almost beginning to enjoy the game. ‘I doubt we’d have anything to say to each other any more, now that we’ve finished with school … though,’ (and here I smiled noncommittally) ‘of course I’d like to hear about his travels.’

      ‘Oh no,’ she answered. ‘He was particularly interested in you. I was telling him how you’d become a medical miracle and practically a doctor yourself. I told him how you’d cured Father’s fever by reading Galen. He liked that.’

      I did cure Father once, a few years ago. And I did consult Galen. De differentiis febrium, the book was called; on the difference between fevers. It was when Father came back exhausted and hot and sweating and fitting from one of his diplomatic trips to France, and none of the doctors who came to the house could do anything for him. They all loved it when I pronounced that he had what Galen called tertian fever. But the truth is I couldn’t appreciate Galen – what they called heroic doctoring, with lots of recommendations to purge and bleed your patient and show off in your diagnosis – it seemed like hot air to me. All I did was quietly give him a simple draught of willow-bark infusion that I’d bought on Bucklersbury. One of the apothecaries told me it would cool his blood. It did – he was up and about again within a day. I couldn’t tell any of them how easy it was, though; they’d have thought me simple-minded. It was easier to let them go on believing in Galen’s three-day fever.

      ‘He said you were the one who got him interested in medicine in the first place. He said it was all because you used to go walking in Bucklersbury talking to the herbalists,’ Elizabeth went on, and I was aware of her eyes on my face again, ‘and how he’d love to see you again. And then he said, “It would have to be on a Thursday, of course.” But he was laughing, so perhaps he didn’t mean anything by it.’

      Another silence.

      I pushed my platter gently back.

      ‘Well, it would always be good to see John again. I miss the old days in London, when it was easy for so many people to call by. Don’t you?’ I said finally, looking round for the brooch I’d put down and displaying so little interest in the idea of a visit from John that I could see her secret curiosity, over whatever it was, finally wane.

      But of course I could think of nothing else afterwards. And I’d woken up this morning earlier than usual and full of hope – because today was Thursday.

      It happened more awkwardly than I could possibly have imagined. When we finally saw a likely-looking wherry crawling down the edge of the river, we all poured out of the wicket gate like an overenthusiastic welcoming committee and rushed to the landing stage to freeze our spontaneous selves at the water’s edge.

      But there were two people, not one, arranged uncomfortably around the pyramid of bags and boxes stowed in the bottom of the boat. They didn’t seem to know each other, or be talking. But both wore foreign clothes. And both began to gather their belongings about them as if they were going to get out.

      Dame Alice was staring at them, perplexed, visibly wondering which was our guest and inspecting the packages for signs of paints and easels and an artist’s paraphernalia.

      One was a thick-set man of about my age, whose square face was covered, from head to blunt yeoman chin, with a layer of shortish, fairish, curlyish hair. He had eyes set in solid pouches of flesh, and ruddy cheeks, and a short nose. He was looking out with a stranger’s hesitant hope of a kind welcome. The other was a tall man with an old dark cloak wrapped around his face up to the ears. It was only when he stood up, making the boat wobble, and jumped out on long, energetic legs, that I recognised his big hook of a nose and the indefinable sadness in eyes that reflected the sky. He didn’t look a day older.

      ‘John?’ I said, questioningly. Then there was an explosion of sound from behind me.

      ‘John!’ Elizabeth yelled joyfully, completely forgetting the decorum expected of a married woman, and slid out from William’s arm to rush forward into those of the tall man. He took a half-step back, then braced himself, caught her, and opened his arms wider as if to catch more children.

      ‘Little Lizzie!’ he called, putting a smile on his face, and looked round rather anxiously as though hoping that his other former pupils would join the embrace.

      Then something went through the whole group. A shiver, as though they’d all come out hoping to console themselves with a taste of imitation happiness and had suddenly been offered a plateful of the real thing. They tightened around the newcomers like starving beasts of prey. Everything else they might have been out in the garden to do went clean out of their heads. Everyone was suddenly caught up in the old days. One beat behind their sister, Margaret Roper and Cecily Heron ran up to the newcomer. He looked relieved at the warmth of this three-woman collective embrace, so relieved that he seemed almost about to swing them all around in the air at once, but perhaps remembered that they were three young matrons now, and not small girls, or started worrying about the danger of flinging them into the choppy river in mid-arc. He let go of them all, a little suddenly.

      ‘That’s never John Clement?’ Dame Alice said, and for a moment I thought I saw tears in her eyes. That was impossible, of course – she was always so brisk. But that moist glimmer I must have imagined did remind me how she and John Clement used to huddle together to discuss how best to handle the younger me. She never knew I was listening from the gallery; he probably didn’t either, though I stopped being sure of that. I remembered feeling reassured that this forthright, no-nonsense woman worried over my nightmares and studied quietness back then; reassured too at how she trusted our first teacher, and at how carefully she’d listen to his slow, thoughtful responses. They were old friends.

      ‘Clement!’ old Sir John barked, looking astonished – the closest that the old authoritarian could get to being excited. And he began shuffling vaguely forward.

      John Clement bowed low to Dame Alice (in his quiet way, he’d always had elaborate manners). He bowed lower still to Grandfather. But then his formality gave way and he put those long arms, which still waved more than most other people’s, around both of their backs at the same time. I thought he was only a breath away from whirling them off the ground too.

      There was a sudden babble of welcome. Voices testing their strength. Cheeks and hands and arms proffered in greeting. And all those insincere phrases people say. ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ ‘You look younger than ever!’

      But it stopped as quickly as it started. He was looking around, as if he hadn’t seen everyone he was looking for. And then he caught sight of me, and I saw his face light up.

      ‘Meg – I’ve come on Thursday,’ he began. And СКАЧАТЬ