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the woman who’d opened the door – easily amused, susceptible to beauty – found she couldn’t despise him.
She thought of decline and the fact that she was tied to it. She stopped smiling.
The only force comparable to an Ainsworth enthusiasm was the speed with which it passed.
If he had left her in the middle of the night, fleeing with the child, wasn’t it because he knew what she really was? How he knew, she couldn’t make out. But some knowledge is beyond language.
The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare.
His face retained that impenetrable glaze – impenetrable because so much itself – with apparently nothing hidden or masked about it. It was a confoundment, like honesty itself. Eliza was reminded of someone. Frances! But how ridiculous. And yet: Frances. She who had worn no masks and was therefore almost impossible to understand.
And what else is honesty – as the new Mrs Ainsworth liked to say – but a face what reads like an open book?
knowledge of life is the least enviable of all species of knowledge, because it can only be acquired by painful experience. lady blessington
What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times.
It was during that tumultuous year of 1838 that she felt she had finally understood what writing was for, or at least what it was for in William’s case: escape from the void. Distraction.
How she described writing for herself in real life.
Mrs Touchet almost objected, but then remembered they were alone. And in the absence of an audience, she realized, nothing really offended her, except cruelty.
Here, in England, love was not a passion but a kind of adding up – a consolidation
Indeed, it seemed to her now that the two islands were, in reality, two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined, and that this was a truth that did not have to be sought out or hunted down, it was not hidden behind a veil or screen or any kind of door. It was and had always been everywhere, like weather.
When young she had not found kindness attractive: she had overlooked it. Goodness, yes, magnetism, certainly, but kindness had not registered. Now that she was old, kindness seemed to her to be the only thing that really mattered. The only truly attractive quality. And what a kind face had Mr Bogle . .
Was he really so good or did he only want to be seen to be good? Does it matter?
The base, transactional nature of it all! Was this what daughters were for? Even the girls themselves seemed only too aware of the conditional basis of their appearance at table, as if they had always known they owed men their beauty and now the time had come to pay that debt in full. The mutuality Mrs Touchet had always believed possible, an idealized table, around which men and women met as equals, employing only their wits – this was revealed to be a hopelessly naive vision. Beauty trumped all other considerations.
she wondered if she was lying to tell the truth, like a novelist.
Who was she, really? Who were her people? The Ladies of Llangollen? But then there had been, and always was, William. And now this queer feeling for Bogle. She had played the dominant Bloomer with Frances, the feminine muse for William, and perhaps, in some imagined utopia, she could be met on even, common ground with a clever soul like Bogle, who seemed to live as she had always wished to, that is, with no illusions.
‘Why do you think it within your power?’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Where does it come from? This power? To bestow freedom. Every Englishman I meet seems to think he has it.’ Mrs Touchet was astonished. ‘But I am quite lacking in that quantity, Henry. I have no power. I also beg you to remember I am a Scot – and a woman! However: I am a Briton, as you are yourself. The power invested in Parliament surely concerns us both . . .’ ‘Parliament hands down the laws that govern us, yes. It cannot bestow freedom itself.’ Mrs Touchet was confused: ‘All I intended to say was that I feel confident that the
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