Chapter 4: His Mother's Opinion

Daniel Brooks arrived at the Kensington house on Saturday with a bottle of wine under one arm, a bag of terrible sweets under the other, and the conviction that everyone he loved needed to be fed.

He was thirty-five, a children's surgeon at St Thomas', a big, untidy, cheerful man with a loud laugh and the large, careful hands of someone who spent his working days mending things that could not afford to be mended badly. He had known Dominic since their first week at university, when they had been assigned the same cramped room and had discovered that one of them could not sleep without silence and the other could not sleep without a radio. They had been friends ever since, in the way of men who never discussed it. When Clara opened the door, Daniel lifted her clean off the floor, set her down again and studied her face with the frank professional interest he gave to a scan.

"There she is. I was beginning to think he had hidden you."

"He keeps me in the cellar with the good wine," Clara said, and was glad to find that she could still make a joke.

"It is the only sensible place for either of you." He followed her through to the kitchen, dropping the sweets on the counter. "How are you? Properly. Not the polite answer."

"I am well. Very well."

"Mm." He leaned against the counter and watched her fill the kettle. "You know what I miss? You used to argue with me about everything. We once spent an entire wedding reception disagreeing about whether a building could be honest. You called me a philistine in front of the bishop. When did you stop?"

Clara laughed, because it was true, and because it was not a question she could answer. "I got tired of losing."

"You never lost. You merely stopped turning up." He said it lightly, but his eyes stayed on her face a moment too long, and she busied herself with the cups.

The front door opened at half past twelve, and a clear, well-bred voice called, "Only me." Margaret Ashford came down the hall in a camel coat with a wicker basket on her arm and a look of brisk goodwill. She had a way of arriving that made a house feel as though it had been inspected. She kissed Dominic, who had come out of the study, and nodded warmly to Daniel, and gave Clara her usual cool, impartial smile.

"I shall not stay. I came about the dinner on the twentieth, and I have brought you a few things from the kitchen at home. Mrs. Pryor made far too much." She set down the basket and looked around the room with the faint, expert air of a woman reading the temperature of a house. "Dominic, I have been thinking. Since it is to be held here this year, I will send Mrs. Pryor over to run it, and my florist. It is so much simpler."

"Margaret, I have planned the menu," Clara said. "I thought I might do it myself."

"Of course you did, dear, and it is very sweet of you." Margaret patted her arm. "But the Ashford dinner has a particular standard. Forty guests, and the Hartleys. I do not think one can expect it to come naturally to a girl who did not grow up with that kind of entertaining. It takes a certain upbringing. Nobody blames you."

The kitchen was very quiet. Clara stood still with her hand on the kettle, and the heat rose through her face, and she looked at her husband.

Dominic was looking at the basket. "Mother, I am sure it is all fine," he said. "Let us not make a fuss. Daniel, will you have some wine?"

That was all. He did not say it unkindly. He simply moved the conversation along, as a man might step around a puddle, and Margaret, who had never needed more than that, smiled, said she would send Mrs. Pryor on Monday, and went out to her car.

Dominic carried the wine to the terrace afterward, and Daniel followed him with two glasses and shut the door behind them.

It was a pale, bright afternoon, and the garden lay quiet beyond the stone steps. Dominic dropped into a chair and rubbed his eyes. He felt faintly tired, in a way he could not locate, as though he had walked through a room and knocked something over without hearing it fall. "My mother means well," he said. "She is old-fashioned. It is just the way she talks."

"Is it." Daniel sat down opposite him and took a long, thoughtful swallow. "Ashford, I like your mother. I have eaten her trifle for fifteen years. But I watched a woman be told, in her own kitchen, that she could not be trusted to host a dinner because of her family. And I watched her husband ask whether I wanted wine."

"I was changing the subject."

"You were leaving her standing there."

"Clara does not like a scene," Dominic said. It sounded reasonable aloud. "She would have hated it if I had made one. She is not like that. She is calm. She gets on with things."

"I know. That is rather the point." Daniel turned the glass in his hands. "She has gone quiet, Dominic. Not sad quiet. Worse. She used to bounce off the walls, and now she goes about the house like a very polite guest. I mentioned it because I thought you would have noticed it before I did."

"She is perfectly happy." The words came out harder than he intended. "She has everything she could possibly want. She has the house, and her freedom, and no financial worry at all. I made certain of that, from the very beginning. Whatever she asks for, she has. She is not unhappy, Daniel. She would tell me."

"Would she?"

Dominic opened his mouth, and for a moment nothing came.

"I operate on children," Daniel said, more gently. "Do you know what I tell frightened parents? That the hospital will do everything it can, and that it is the best equipped in London. And they nod, and then they look at me and ask if I will be in the room. That is the only thing they want. Not the building, not the machines. Someone present." He shrugged, awkwardly. "Providing a comfortable life is not the same as being in it. You have given her a very beautiful house. I just do not think she has seen you in it for a long time."

"I am here every evening."

"You are in the building. It is different."

Dominic was silent. He could feel, below the irritation, a small cold thread of something he did not want to examine. Then Daniel grinned, suddenly, with the breezy relief of a man who has said his piece and is not going to say it twice. "I am done. I swear. Your mother was magnificent, by the way. It was like watching a lioness correct a gazelle's posture."

Dominic laughed in spite of himself. It cracked the tension, and Daniel poured him more wine, and they talked about rugby until the silence felt safe again.

Clara found Daniel alone in the kitchen twenty minutes later, rinsing his glass at the sink with the air of a man pretending not to be waiting.

"Dominic is on the phone," he said. "It sounded important. I thought I would hide here and make myself useful."

"You are standing in the kitchen with a glass."

"That is the most useful thing I can do." He dried his hands on a tea towel. "I will say one thing and then I will leave you alone. I am not here to take sides, Clara. I am here because I like you. And I saw your face when my oldest friend asked me whether I wanted wine."

She leaned against the counter and looked at the floor. It was strange how a kind voice could undo her more thoroughly than a cruel one. "I do not think he is unkind," she said at last. "I want you to know that. I think he honestly does not see it. He thinks that because nothing is wrong, nothing is missing."

"And is something missing?"

"Yes." It was the first time she had said it aloud to anyone but Sophia, and she was surprised by how steady it sounded. "I used to be in his life. Now I am in his house. I keep waiting for him to look up and notice that I am not at the table, and he does not, and I have stopped being sure it is his fault. I think I have been so careful not to be a burden that I have made myself very easy to overlook."

Daniel did not say anything for a moment. "Then tell him that," he said. "Not me. Him. In those words, the way you just said them to me."

"I have tried."

"Try it as though he were someone who could not read your face. Because I am fairly sure he cannot." He smiled at her, crooked and kind. "I am a surgeon, not a counselor. But I know when a patient needs to be told the truth in plain language."

The door opened, and Dominic came in, pocketing his phone. His eyes went at once to Clara, and then to Daniel, and she saw him register, with the slow wariness of a man entering an unfamiliar room, that something had passed between them without him.

"Clara." He crossed the kitchen and, to her surprise, took her hand. "I have been thinking about your birthday."

"My birthday is in three weeks."

"I know. I do not want to do something at a restaurant. I want to take you away. The Cotswolds, that little inn you liked, three days, no phones, nothing. Only you." He squeezed her fingers. "I promise. The whole weekend. Whatever else happens, that is yours."

Clara looked at him, at his tired, earnest face, at the man who had once whispered jokes to her in a pub theatre in Islington, and she felt the old hope rise in her chest, small and warm and impossible to refuse. Behind him, Daniel raised one eyebrow, very slightly, and said nothing.

"Thank you," she said, and she let herself believe it.