The Jane Austen Society(30)

Adam knew best to shut his book.

“Tells me the poor girl can’t get out of bed. That Dr. Gray is beside himself with worry, for all he apparently botched that delivery—has taken to checking in on her so regularly, you’d think she was his only patient.’

“Maybe right now she’s his most important one.”

His mother turned about at the stove to stare pointedly at him. “Now there’s a pretty young thing. Why didn’t you ever have your eye on her?”

Adam pushed the book a little farther away from him.

“Adam, my boy, one has to be on the lookout for these things. You need to find someone to take care of you. I won’t be around forever, you know.”

He did know—she reminded him regularly. He hated when she talked like this. To him it felt the opposite of caring. It wasn’t helping him find the key to those happier worlds he read about in books; it only made him feel trapped and desperate and even more alone.

“Adeline Grover’s never going to be interested in the likes of me, Mother. And now’s surely not the time to discuss it.”

“Suit yourself. Just know the village is always speculating about you, whether you want to discuss it or not, ” she said with a shrug, then went and cut herself some bread and butter on the counter. Sitting down across from him with her tea, she glanced at the book before him.

“Didn’t you just read that?”

“Last winter.”

“You read too much. You read her too much. You should be out, go to Alton more.”

“I go to Alton.”

“You go to the movies. You sit alone in the movie house, watching some romantic silliness. Or reading it,” she added, with an insolent nod at his book. “Your nose always in a book, just like your father.”

He took another sip of his coffee, then stood up.

“Where are you off to?” she asked, unrolling the afternoon newspaper that she had brought in with her.

“I just remembered I did promise Mrs. Lewis to help with the mulching in the garden before there’s a hard frost. Sun will be down in an hour or so.”

“There’s a boy.” His mother smiled approvingly at him as she picked up her newspaper.

Adeline Grover sat in the window seat she had improvised for herself at the front of the drawing room. She had taken half of an old swinging door she had found in the garden shed and laid it over both the deep windowsill and the level top of the adjoining radiator. She had covered it all with a thick quilted counterpane and a variety of cushions, and there she could often be found, sitting with a stack of books, but mostly staring out the window, watching the rest of the town move on with its lives.

She was in trouble and she knew it. She was very aware that she had not allowed herself to fully feel the loss of Sam, often pushing the thought of him out of her mind, as if he were simply off somewhere, still fighting the war. Losing Sam had been difficult and complicated enough, let alone the death of their baby. She was not coping with either of these losses, not in the way one had to in order to move on. She had surprised herself with this shortcoming—she was very proud and very smart, and it had never occurred to her that she would get something so significant, and unavoidable, so wrong. But she was at least smart enough to be able to trick everyone else into thinking she was doing okay. It had become almost a game to her. And while playing the game of appearing okay, she felt so completely detached—even liberated—from her real self, the person she had been before everything went wrong, that she marvelled at this ability to be so objective and cut off from one’s own feelings. As if this were the real achievement.

She was starting to get a bit of a window into the male mind as a result. She could only wonder at what a lifetime of both emotional avoidance and overactivity yielded as a result. She thought about Sam’s impenetrable optimism even in the face of an opposite reality—his determination that they would be married, his forgiving of her every slip, his bright and happy surface. She had loved that about him and how he helped keep her so moored to daily life: how every day was a new day, and yesterday didn’t matter, and there was no point in ever worrying about the future.

She pictured him in his bomber plane, the gauges rattling before him, and the sea and the rocks below, and both the intensity and the detachment that he would have brought to this one terrifying moment. He would have given his all, even though the effort didn’t matter—you were just a speck on someone else’s gauge, a tightrope walk across an abyss, an entire human life balanced on the point of a needle.

Now she was on the point of the needle, too. There were only two ways that this could go. If she kept this up and fell off and into the abyss, she might pull herself out one day—but she also might not. So she had to find a way to stop what she was doing, this medicating away of her unavoidable pain, and taking advantage of poor Dr. Gray. For she was certainly taking advantage of him—of his guilt, and his compassion, and the confusing little soft spot he seemed to have for her, and of all the things that made him an especially caring man, outside of being a doctor.

She looked out the window at the setting sun, and at Adam Berwick in the garden with her mother, cutting back the dead growth and covering up the more delicate perennials ahead of the winter frost. When the two of them spied her in the window seat, her mother must have said something to Adam, because he put down the shovel and picked up a basket at his side as they headed into the house together.