Aunt Hatt cleared her throat and put her teacup down.
What more can I tell her? Margaret thought. She thinks it’s just a simple case of falling in love . . .
Last winter, with her health recovered, Margaret had begun her life again. She felt left behind. Annie was still at home, still doing the work of the church but chafing at the smallness of the village. Annie, too, felt that God needed more of her in the great world out there. She read a great deal and was full of ambition.
For Margaret, whose world had for so long been confined to bedroom and parlour, the cold, crisp months were very happy ones. With Charles there as well, there was much talk and the liveliness that a guest can add to family life.
Margaret started visiting again, took up her beloved work with the children, and began, at last, to see that she had a future.
‘Now that I look back to this spring,’ she said, her right index finger tracing a small circle on the leather arm of Aunt Hatt’s chair, ‘I suppose I can see signs. You see, we knew really that Charles had been ill. But when he came, he did not seem ill exactly. I was caught up in him completely. He was like no one I had ever met.’ The tears came again and she wiped them away.
She could not seem to speak, as if they were veering too close to the darkness of what had happened, the way Charles had drawn her in until he could pluck her like a stringed instrument.
‘I thought – and he made me think – that he was my destiny. He even used that word. And I was so unused to thinking about what I should do . . . I didn’t know anything about myself! While I was ill there was no point in thinking about the future. It was as if I was pressed against a wall – there was no road I could take. We all thought of the missions because that’s what people like us do – but I was never so sure, not like Annie. So to marry Charles and be the wife of a minister seemed to be what God was steering me towards.’ She stopped and looked up again, her eyes wet. ‘Not steering – hurling, more like. What could make more sense? Charles told me he loved me. I . . .’ She stopped in confusion.
Into the silence, Aunt Hatt said, ‘Nothing like someone telling you they love you to make you feel you must love them back, eh?’
Margaret looked up in surprise. ‘Has it happened to you, Aunt?’
‘Oh –’ She brushed it off with a laugh. ‘Only when I was very young. A lad mooning about who almost persuaded me. But then I met Eb. This other feller didn’t stand a chance after that!’
Margaret smiled, but she could see it was not the same. Already fragile, she had lost herself to him. He was like the smoke and fire that descended on Mount Sinai; like the rushing wind of Pentecost, bearing her along.
The door opened suddenly and Uncle Eb’s cheerful face appeared. ‘All right, ladies?’ he asked.
‘Eb,’ Harriet said in a warning tone. ‘Just give us a few more moments, will you?’
Eb looked from one to the other of them, suddenly solemn. ‘Right you are,’ he said, closing the door behind him.
But the mood had been broken. Margaret could not bear to go on, to put these things into words to Aunt Harriet. Not even about how it began, the afternoon when she and Charles had been alone in the house. Even this was not the beginning of how her feelings first caught light, because she had been fascinated by him from the moment he arrived on their doorstep in that sweeping black coat. But that day they were alone in the parlour was when he captured her, hungry and innocent as she was.
Charles was standing with his back to the fire as if deeply lost in thought, his gaze fixed on the trees beyond the window. Margaret had been about to ask him if he would care for some tea, but she sat respectfully, not wanting to interrupt. She ached for him to share his thoughts with her.
Suddenly seeming to come back to the room, he looked across at her and smiled.
‘May I sit with you a moment, Margaret?’
She was on a stiff-backed couch on which there was only room for two and she was startled by this. Was it quite correct for them to sit so close, side by side? But of course, such a pure and holy man could not mean any harm – and in her father’s house.
‘Of course,’ she said, shifting as far towards one end as she could. ‘Please make yourself comfortable. Shall we have some tea?’
‘Oh, in a moment,’ he said. He gave a quick smile. ‘That would be nice, yes.’
He moved the tails of his jacket aside with a delicate gesture and sat lightly beside her, on her right. Margaret’s heart felt like a piston inside her, so loud she thought he must hear it. Blood thundered through her veins.
He turned and gave her that smile, looking carefully at her.
‘You are an astonishingly fine young woman, do you know that, Margaret?’ He laughed at her confusion. ‘No – of course you don’t. And that is one of the things that makes you so lovely.’ He looked at her intently. Slowly he said, ‘I can see things in you which I don’t believe you even know are there . . . Such qualities . . .’
She was looking down into her lap now, overwhelmed by this attention, these compliments. Her face, for so long pallid, was hot with blushes.
‘Do look at me, Margaret, will you?’
She managed to raise her head. His flinty eyes, which she had so often seen cast heavenward, were fixed on her. Here he was, so close that the creases of his black jacket, the pores of his pale skin and bristles of his beard, the sharp, well-defined nose, were all intensely visible. She could hear each of his breaths and the hairs on her body stood on end.
‘Might you do one thing for me, Margaret?’ he said in a tender voice.
She began to tremble. What did this mean? Did Charles . . . Was he about to put into words feelings which she could hardly believe he would ever feel for her? No, she told herself – what a fool she was. He would ask for some errand in the village, some assistance in his godly work. After all, she was so much younger than he. How could he possibly be thinking of her in any other way?
‘Of course,’ she said in a low voice. ‘What is it?’
He sat back, resting his right elbow on the arm of the couch and still not moving his gaze from her.
‘I always think a woman looks at her most lovely when she sits like this –’ He laid his left hand on the small of her back and she straightened. ‘Delicately upright. The hair perhaps like this . . .’ Gently he lifted her long plait and laid it so that it fell forward over her right shoulder. ‘And with the ankles crossed in front.’
Margaret crossed her ankles.
‘There.’ He gazed at her, seeming entranced. Margaret felt that no one had ever looked at her the way Charles Barber looked at her.
‘But your father doesn’t want you to marry him – is that it?’ Aunt Harriet said, as if impatient to get to the crux of the matter.
Margaret lowered her eyes, unable to hold her aunt’s gaze. This explanation, handed to her for the moment, was what would have to do. She just could not put into words the feeling of those nights, Annie and herself together in their bedroom, the chest of drawers shifted in front of the door, knowing that he was lying in the room next to theirs.
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘That’s the problem.’