Chapter 8
Table Nine
The Orangery of the Ardent Hotel was a long glass room built onto the back of the building in 1887 for growing fruit. It was now used for growing conversation, which needed a good deal more heat.
There were twelve round tables under the glass roof, each laid for ten, with white cloths and silver and a low bowl of white roses. Between the tables stood potted palms and lemon trees in tubs. A string trio played something by Fauré at the far end, beside a small stage. The glass above was black with night, and the lamps below were reflected in it, hundreds of them, so the whole room seemed to float inside a second one hung upside down above its head. Waiters in white gloves moved between the tables with trays. The air was a warm, wet soup of perfume and beeswax and wine.
He had never liked a room that could see itself.
"Mr. Wray." It was the president of the Society, a huge, pink, friendly man called Sir Gilbert Pownall, with a white mustache and a voice made for the open air. He took Callum's hand in a damp, enormous grip. "Delighted. Truly. We've been looking forward to this. My wife has read every word about your Gerard. She says it's the most exciting thing to happen to a sky since Constable."
"That's very kind."
"She'll want to meet you. Margaret! Margaret, here he is. The sky man."
He was introduced. He shook hands with a retired admiral, a bishop's widow, two brothers who owned a gallery in the Arcade, and a thin young curator with a limp and such shy, fierce eagerness that Callum wanted to take him aside and tell him it would be all right. He said the things you say. He heard himself say them, in a pleasant, smooth baritone, polite and a bit absent, like a recording of his own voice. His right ear caught most of it. His left, as always, took in the rest as a soft, warm static, so that the whole evening was heard from half a step outside.
They put him at the top table, on Sir Gilbert's right, with his back to the glass wall.
It was a good seat for a speaker. It gave him a clear view of the room. He sat with his napkin on his knee, in the dark suit, the speech in his inner pocket, and looked out over the Orangery the way a man looks over a field he has to cross. A hundred people. A blur of black and white and jewel colors. The waiters dipping and rising. A woman in scarlet at the next table laughing with her head thrown back, so that the lamps flashed in her earrings.
He wasn't looking for her. He wanted to be clear on that, afterward. He wasn't looking for anything. He was sitting in a hot room trying to eat poached salmon with a fork that was too heavy, listening to the admiral's views on the Royal Navy, and thinking, in the cool part of his mind that never switched off, about the way the glass roof reflected the light.
He gave the speech between the fish and the meat.
It went well. He knew when it did, as he knew when a varnish was clearing, by a change in the texture of the silence. He stood at the lectern on the little stage with the lamps in his eyes and talked for ten minutes about the Gerard: the milky bloom on the water that turned out to be a century of cigar smoke, and the sky beneath it that came up under his swab like a returning memory, blue and then pearl and then a high thin silver, a sky with weather in it. He didn't mention Isabel. He didn't need to. He felt her in the sentences like a pressure in the ear.
A restorer's work, he said, is mostly a matter of taking away. You don't add the beauty. It was there already. You remove whatever someone else decided to put on top of it, patiently, a square inch at a time. And sometimes, when you've done that, you find the painter made a mistake and corrected it, and the correction is still visible under the paint, like a thought that wouldn't quite go away.
He paused. In the silence a spoon rang against a plate.
Those are my favorite parts, he said. The mistakes. That's where you can see that someone was there.
There was applause. It was warm and real and a little surprised. Sir Gilbert thumped the table. The bishop's widow dabbed her eyes with the corner of her napkin. Callum stepped down from the stage into the heat and noise with the blood pounding in his ears and his legs not quite his own. To his great surprise, he found he wasn't thinking of her at all.
He was thinking of the sky.
It was such a small, plain, ordinary feeling that it took him a moment to know it. He stood in the middle of the Orangery with the applause fading and the waiters closing in with the next course, and understood that for ten minutes he had been completely taken up with something other than his own loss. It was like stepping out of a house into a clean cold wind. He took a long breath. He thought, absurdly: I could do this. I could go on.
Then he lifted his eyes and saw table nine.
It stood near the middle of the room, in the shadow of a lemon tree, a little apart from the others, as if whoever laid it had hoped for quiet. Ten places, eight of them filled. The two nearest him were taken by a man in a velvet jacket and an old lady in lilac, who were having a lively argument about a cathedral.
On the far side, with her back half turned to him, a woman sat alone.
He took her in the way you take in the end of a row. A dark green dress, plain, with a high neck and long sleeves. Dark hair pinned loosely at the nape, a few strands escaped. A straight spine. A way of sitting, with one forearm laid along the edge of the cloth, a little forward, as though carrying something small. She was holding a glass of water. She wasn't drinking it. She was looking at the stage where he had stood, steadily, with the intent, faintly troubled look of a person trying to remember where she had left something.
He didn't know why he looked a second time.
It was something in the line of the shoulder. He would never be able to say more than that. It was nothing, a shape, the way a body sits in a chair, the sort of likeness the dreaming mind throws up on its own, to be shaken off with a breath. He had seen it forty times since November. He knew the drill. He felt the small cold lurch and told himself, as he had been taught, this is my grief, and it is trying to help, and turned away.
And the woman raised her hand.
She did it idly. She laid it flat on the tablecloth, the right one, beside her glass. Her forefinger lifted and came down. Once. Twice. Three times. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Then she laughed.
He couldn't hear it. The Orangery was too loud, the trio too close, the whole hot glass room a vessel of noise. He saw only her shoulders move and her head tip a little to one side as the man in velvet said something, some joke about the cathedral. He saw the corner of her mouth go up, and her eyes close, and a small helpless unwrapping run through her whole body, from the collarbone to the hands.
His own hand had found the back of the nearest chair.
A coincidence, said the careful voice. Three taps. A great many people tap the table.
Not in threes, said another.
You're tired. You gave a speech. It's the heat.
Look at her.
Don't.
He couldn't have said afterward how long he stood. A minute. Less. The waiters went round him like water round a post. Someone touched his sleeve, the thin young curator perhaps, asking a question about the bloom, and he said something, and the touch withdrew. The trio began a new piece. And at table nine, in the shadow of the lemon tree, the woman in green finished laughing, wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her wrist, and turned her head.
It wasn't a likeness.
He understood that at once, and it was the worst moment of his life, and it lasted perhaps a second and a half. It wasn't a likeness. It wasn't the fading, half-wrong, hopeful lurch of a stranger at a bus stop, the forehead too broad, the nose a little off. It was her. The long, lively, clever face. The wide mouth with its slightly crooked upper lip. The gray eyes, set a little too far apart, under dark level brows. The single line that ran down between the eyes when she was thinking, and the faint shadow under the cheekbone, and the way the whole face seemed, at rest, to be on the point of speaking.
He knew every inch of it. He knew it better than his own. He had spent eleven years in its company, in the mornings, in the dark, in all the ordinary lights of a life, and he would have known it anywhere, in a crowd, at a distance, with his eyes shut, by the smell of it.
She looked at him across the Orangery.
Their eyes met. In the long glass room under the black mirroring roof, with a hundred voices going on around them, the woman in the green dress went quite still. The smile slid from her face, and her hand on the white cloth slowly closed into a fist.
Oh, thought Callum. It was a small, soft, wondering sound in the empty room of his mind. Oh. There you are.
He took a step.