Chapter 2: The Woman Beside Him

The Ashford house in Surrey had been built to be looked at, and on Sunday afternoons, when Margaret was entertaining, it looked its best.

Clara had been coming to the house for seven years and still felt, every time she walked up the gravel drive, as though she were arriving for an interview. The stone front was covered in pale wisteria, the lawns were cut in perfect stripes, and the hall smelled of beeswax and lilies. Dominic parked beside a row of expensive cars, came around to open her door, and put his hand briefly at her elbow as they climbed the steps. He was in a good mood. He had slept well, he had taken no calls in the car, and he was looking forward to seeing his father. She could see it in the loosened line of his shoulders, and she wished with sudden force that she could simply enjoy it with him.

"Clara, dear." Margaret Ashford met them in the hall, silver-haired and straight-backed in a gray wool dress, and kissed the air an inch from each of Clara's cheeks. "You are looking a little pale. Are they not feeding you? Dominic, you must see that she eats. Someone in that house has to."

"She eats, Mother," Dominic said mildly, and kissed her cheek in return.

Margaret had never said anything unkind to Clara's face that could not be explained away as concern. That was her gift. She was sixty-two, immaculate, and utterly devoted to the idea of her family, and she had decided long ago what a wife for her son ought to look like. Clara had never quite managed to match the picture, though Margaret was too well bred to say so. She simply let a little coolness hang in the air, like the faint smell of polish, so that one noticed it only when it was gone.

"Victoria is already here," Margaret added, turning toward the drawing room with a warmth she did not bring to her other sentences. "She has been helping me with the flowers. Such a sensible girl."

Victoria Hale rose from the sofa as they came in, wearing a soft blue sweater and no jewelry, with a vase of white roses in her hands. She looked completely at home. It was not an accident, Clara knew. Victoria's father had been Richard's closest friend at university, and when he died, Margaret had taken the nineteen-year-old daughter under her wing with the fierce, practical kindness of a woman who liked to be needed. Victoria called Richard by his first name. She knew where the good glasses were kept. When she smiled at Clara and said, "How lovely to see you," it sounded perfectly sincere, and that was the difficulty with Victoria. She had never once given Clara a reason to dislike her.

Lunch was laid in the dining room, at the long mahogany table where Margaret held court. Place cards stood at each setting, written in her angular hand. Clara found hers near the end, beside a lamp, facing a draught from the window. Dominic's card was at his mother's right hand, and next to it, so close that their chairs nearly touched, was Victoria's.

"Clara, dear, would you mind terribly changing places with Richard?" Margaret said, as they sat. "Victoria feels the cold so, and the radiator is just behind her. You are so sturdy. I know you will not mind."

"Not at all," Clara said, and moved.

Dominic, in his chair at the head of the table, was telling his father about a house he had seen in the country, an old rectory with a walled garden, and he did not look up. He had not noticed the move. He was at ease in a way that Clara had not seen in weeks, leaning back, with his sleeves turned up and his laughter coming easily. She watched it as one might watch a lit window from the street.

Dominic had never been a man who noticed seating plans, Clara thought. He took the world as he found it, and what he found around his mother's table was a family lunch, and nothing in it troubled him. His father was in good spirits. His mother was pleased. Victoria, beside him, was telling the story of a delayed flight to Lisbon and a hotel lift that had stuck between floors for forty minutes, and he laughed until he had to put down his glass. "Do you remember the porter," he said, "who tried to pass us bread rolls through the gap?"

"I remember you telling him it was the best offer you had had all week," said Victoria, and he laughed again, and Margaret smiled at both of them with the contentment of a woman who has found two pieces of a puzzle that fit.

He turned, then, to include his wife. "Clara, you would have loved it."

"I am sure I would have," Clara said. The trip had been in the spring. It had lasted five days. He had told her about it afterward, in the car from the airport, as an amusing thing that had happened.

"Clara." Richard Ashford, who had taken her old seat, leaned toward her. He was a tall, spare man of sixty-six, with his son's gray eyes and a habit of watching a room before he spoke. He did not say much at these lunches, and she had always suspected that he noticed far more than he said. "Dominic tells me you are still drawing. What are you working on at the moment?"

It was such a simple question that it caught her off guard. She felt her face warm. "A small thing," she said. "Only a sketch of a staircase. An idea I have had for a long time."

"A staircase." He looked genuinely interested. "I should like to see it one day."

"Of course," said Clara, and opened her mouth to say more, and across the table Margaret said brightly, "Dominic, you must tell your father about the present."

She stopped. The moment closed up like water. Richard patted her hand once and turned away to listen.

The present was a first edition. Clara did not understand that until the plates were cleared and Dominic reached beneath his chair and brought out a flat parcel wrapped in dark green paper. It was Richard's sixty-sixth birthday, and she had asked Dominic three weeks ago, quite lightly, whether she could help him choose. "I have it handled," he had said, with a quick, grateful smile. Now Richard unwrapped a slim book bound in worn blue cloth, a first edition of a poet he had loved since youth, and turned it slowly in his hands.

"Good God," he said, in a voice that was not quite steady. "Where on earth did you find this?"

"Victoria found it," Dominic said. "She remembered you used to quote it. She traced a dealer in Edinburgh. I only had to pay for it."

"You always remember," Richard said to her, looking up, and Victoria went pink and shook her head, and Margaret said that really, she was a treasure, and Dominic watched them with an easy, unguarded pride. He did not glance down the table, not once, to where his wife sat with her hands folded in her lap. She had known Richard for seven years, and she would have found that book for him if anyone had let her.

The drive home was quiet. Dominic drove, as he always did, with one hand on the wheel, and for a while he hummed under his breath. At the first set of lights he glanced at her.

"You were very quiet today."

"Was I?"

"I thought you would talk to Victoria. She admires you, you know. She told Mother your work was the most original she had seen."

"She is very kind," Clara said. It was true. That was what made it so hard. She looked at the road ahead and said, carefully, "Dominic, did Victoria choose your father's present?"

“She had the idea and found the dealer. It was only a book, Clara. " He seemed puzzled. "Why?"

"Because I asked you three weeks ago if I could help, and you said you had it handled."

"And I did. I did not want to put it on you." He smiled at her, gently, in the green light from the dashboard. "You have so much on your plate."

"I do not," said Clara. "That is what I am trying to say. I have nothing on my plate. I wanted to choose a book for your father."

There was a pause. The lights changed, and he drove forward, and she could see him turning her words over, carefully, looking for the place where they fit. "I did not realize it mattered to you."

"No," Clara said. "I know. I tried to say something to your father at lunch, and there was no room for it. I tried to tell you about the staircase on Tuesday. I tried twice, and you did not hear me either."

"Twice?" He frowned. "I am sure you did not."

She looked out of the window, at the dark hedges flying by, and did not answer. She had spent the whole of the afternoon counting the number of times anyone at that table had asked what she was thinking. There had been one. She had a very clear, quiet feeling that it was the beginning of something, though she could not yet have said what.