‘Are you not hungry?’ she asks. I suppose I must eat. ‘I’ll bet your last fair meal was another life ago. Am I right, sweetheart?’ She beckons me to descend.
‘There is abundant time for an inn-dinner at the Rose and Crown,’ she reassures me, as if she travelled frequently this way, and the sun breaks through the clouds as we cross the yard.
Inside, my eyes accustom to the darkness. There is a fire blazing in a broad hearth, and a savoury smell of wood-smoke and ale. Two men glance up at us and then back to some papers spread out on a table. The girl drawing ale from a barrel at the hatch directs us to a bench. We have our backs to the sunlight which falls through the leaded window, blue with smoke from the fire. The brick floor is swept. The miserable man wearing the great-coat takes a solitary seat on the far side of the room, opening his mouth to order something made with beef, then rubs his belly. He keeps his coat on. There is loud laughter from the porch and then the room seems filled with stir and levity.
How has my life has changed so quickly? I think. I feel small away from home. I feel dizzy with it.
‘What shall we have?’ Lettice Talbot says brightly. ‘Why not oysters!’ The girl wipes a cloth over the table and brings some for us, with hard sallow cheese, and bread. There is a lot of greasy red hair escaping from her cap. She looks at me as she puts them down, then goes away. The food is salty and good, and we eat hungrily without conversation. The girl comes back to remove the dish of empty shells, and Lettice Talbot claps her hands.
‘Brandy!’ she suggests.
‘Brandy?’ I say doubtfully. I don’t mention that I have never tasted it. The girl brings a jug and pours out one glass. The liquid is a bright brown as it catches the sunlight. ‘Drink up,’ Lettice Talbot coaxes, pushing the glass towards me and smiling kindly.
‘But you have none,’ I say.
‘No, no,’ she says, ‘it is for you–you look as though you need it!’
So I swallow it down. It is hot, as though it had within it something of the fire itself.
‘Where are you headed, sweetheart?’ Lettice Talbot asks. I cannot think at first of what to say. As she leans forward, I see a little locket is tied at her neck on a piece of yellow velvet, flashing in the light. The gem set upon it breaks up the brightness sharply into separate colours, as a drop of water might, catching the sunshine after rain. Her neck is smooth and white above the ribbon. She sees me looking and her hand goes to the locket as if to hide it with her fingertips.
‘How did you come by such a lovely thing?’ I exclaim.
‘It’s not real,’ she says quickly. ‘Not a proper diamond.’ And then she smiles and asks again where I am going to. She stares at me when I do not answer, and so I have to embark upon the story I have been making up inside my head.
‘I am travelling at a day’s notice up to London,’ I say, ‘to stay with an ageing cousin suffering from an illness of some gravity.’ My voice sounds like it is reciting lessons.
‘Where does she live?’ Lettice Talbot asks. I think quickly.
‘Within the city walls. She has rooms in a small house, and the servants do not like her and all of them have left her service. She is quite alone.’ I make my face look sorry and anxious as I talk, which is not difficult. My fingers touch my lips as though they know that I am telling lies.
I add with effort that she needs someone to carry water from the pump and cook up broths and sago, and take the slops away; in short the heavy, bending, stirring tasks she cannot do.
‘What sickness is she suffering?’ Lettice Talbot asks, and pours more brandy for me from the jug.
‘Bronchitis,’ I say without a hesitation. I know about bronchitis; my grandmother died all curled up with coughing up dark slimy matter, suffocated by her own lungs when they failed within her, the doctor said. Dr Twiner was a costly body to have stepped inside the house. It seemed scandalous to me that he gained his guineas whether his patients lived or died. The regretful countenance he fixed upon his shiny, well-fed face was glib and practised, and melted away as he ducked his head out of the threshold towards the lane. I watched his diminishing form swinging his polished cane all down the track until the rowans hid him from my view. My mother propped his bill behind the salt box before she sat down suddenly in front of the fire as though her legs were broken, and sobbed there for a week. She was different in those days; it was still possible to guess a little of what she thought on any matter. For one whole week she was too loose and grieved to cook, or clean the babies. Then on the seventh day she set her lip straight and stiffened quite perceptibly throughout the funeral, as though the cold draught that was blowing in under the door of the church was freezing her in more ways than one. The framework of her manner became a shape to hold her feelings in, and from that day on, her outward disposition did but rarely alter.
The room in the inn has darkened.
It occurs to me how, once the lies have started, it should become both easier and more necessary to go on fabricating a pretence. I must construct the lies quite fully, like a makeshift house, and live inside them. Lettice Talbot taps her long fingers on the tabletop, then unbuckles her case to take out a little bottle. She tweaks out the stopper, puts her finger to the hole and tips it up. She presses the wetness lightly to her neck, and an intense, giddy scent the colour of pinks and creamy whites and oranges envelops us. I am almost dazed by it.
How can I tell whether she is listening to me if she does not answer? And yet it is discourteous, I think, to be deceiving her like this. Her eyes are roving round the room as I talk, she is taking things in. I will have to check myself, I think. It will not be long before my conscience has become quite fat with secrets.
I hold my glass up by the stem and tilt the drop of brandy that remains, and, feeling a sudden, foolish need to share a truth and not a lie with her, I laugh and say that drinking it is like drinking fire. I regret my words immediately, but this is no matter because Lettice Talbot does not hear. She has stood up and begun to wrap her patterned shawl more closely around her for the next stage of our journey. How clean and new her clothes are. She pulls on her gloves, and with unease I catch a glimpse of what has happened to her wrists.
WE GO OUT INTO THE OPEN AIR to find the weather turning. My cheeks are hot with liquor and I find that something of the world is changing and unsteady. The sky has darkened and clouded over and the unpleasant woman and her daughter are fussing that it might begin to rain and turn their ribbons limp. The fat woman shifts about on the hams of her legs and makes a great scene out of exchanging her bonnet for a large ugly hat that covers her features and obscures some of the view to my right. At the final bell the great-coated man appears and hauls himself into the waggon. A sour, unclean smell of pipe smoke and urine leaks from his clothes. I am dismayed to see him leer at Lettice Talbot as he pushes by her rudely, and to see him smirk as he rubs against her legs. He wipes some spittle from the side of his mouth with the back of his glove, lurches heavily as he sits down, and goes to sleep under his hat. Lettice Talbot does not remark at his behaviour; it is as though she has not seen it.
The horses strain and gather speed as they pull away from Leather-head.
I ask Lettice Talbot why she would not let me pay for what I had eaten at the inn. I was too confused by brandy to protest as she counted out coins and left them on the table as we left. But she shakes her head vigorously when I try to repay her and raises her hand as though it is a trifling matter.
‘But I have money!’ I insist, too loudly, and she puts her gloved finger swiftly to her mouth.
‘Shh! Quiet!’ she says.
So I am indebted now, and the heat spreading out from the spirits inside me has made the world seem vivid and too much to bear.