“This is Mr. Eliot. He lives down the road. He’s the botanist I was telling your grandfather about.”
William bowed over-formally and winked at Jane on his way back up. “Lovely to meet you, Miss Standen.”
Meredith waved Jane toward the kitchen as if reading her mind. “There are scones in a brown bag on the counter. But get dressed first, please, and run a brush through that hair.” She turned to William, smoothing a grey curl at her temple. “It’s easier to take the children out of Cumbria, I’m afraid, than it is to take the Cumbria out of the children.”
It was Meredith who, four years later, organized Jane’s babysitting. She’d run into William at the local produce shop, commenting, as he tried to unload a basket of groceries at the till with Lily hanging off one arm, that she hadn’t known he shopped there. Meredith took the girl’s hand as William explained that the nanny’s father had had a stroke and she’d flown home to Spain the night before. He was going to have to call an agency, he said, and find someone for the week — maybe just until three each afternoon because he was in the process of making arrangements to get off work early.
Meredith relayed the conversation to Jane as they sat in the Mercedes in stop-and-start traffic that was about to make Jane miss her cello lesson. If she arrived even five minutes late Mikhail would already have left and they would still have to pay him. Jane had only made that mistake once in the year she’d been studying with him, but for at least two lessons after that incident he had been gruffer than usual and Jane wasn’t anxious to work through his distaste again. As she edged along the turn lane that led to the academy, Meredith asked Jane what she thought about helping out with Lily, just for the week, and Jane, craning her head out the window because the lorry in front of them was impossible to see around, said, “Fine, yes.”
Lily was, according to Meredith, a sweet girl, and Jane figured she’d probably be easier to mind than Lewis was when he was eight and Jane was ten and she’d been left in charge at the cottage. And she liked Mr. Eliot, had met him a handful of times in the four years since they’d first been introduced in the garden. He’d always been warm and friendly, though in the year after his wife died he’d seemed bewildered, almost glassy, as if something else was going on behind his eyes. Some months after the funeral, he’d stopped in for tea, sitting stiffly on a tall-backed chair while Meredith offered him biscuits. Jane and Lewis, noticing snowflakes outside, had raced down the stairs to put on their coats, and Jane remembered pausing for a second, watching William curiously from the entrance archway before stepping into the first faint fall of snow.
There are two memories from the weeks of babysitting Lily that Jane circles back to. In the less complicated one William had come home from work with bags of groceries and Jane was helping him put them away. Halfway through he stopped and hopped up onto the counter to direct Jane as to what went where—“upper cupboard,” “crisper”—while juggling three mandarins to amuse Lily. When everything was put away, Lily invited him over to a spot on the dining room floor where she and Jane had organized a teddy bear birthday party. There were six stuffed bears, with varying degrees of wear, set up in a circle around a dishtowel. The birthday bear was wearing a napkin ring for a crown and all the bears had little plastic cups in front of them. Lily handed her father the small green cup that belonged to the brown bear with the chewed-on ears and then expertly tilted a plastic teapot with a mermaid decal on it to pour him tea.
“What kind of tea is this?” He put his nose into the empty cup.
“Chocolate.”
William took a fake sip and said, “Mmm, lovely.” He called over to Jane, who was packing up her cello in the living room. “Miss Standen, would you like some chocolate tea?”
“No, I should get going.” Jane picked up the score she’d propped against a stack of hardcover books on the coffee table and dropped it into her bag.
William stood up and came over with the plastic cup still in his hand. “What were you playing today?”
“Just practising. A prelude I’m working on for my exam.”
He inclined his head. “Will you play something for me before you go?”
“What would you like me to play?”
“Surprise me.”
William waited to see where Jane would sit and when she chose the brocaded bench under the back window he picked up the Hope chair beside the bookshelf and moved it into the middle of the room.
Jane watched him settle in as she checked her tuning. When she was satisfied, she put her bow down and reached into her pocket for a hair elastic and said “Sorry,” because she didn’t mean for him to be watching her tie up her loose hair, fixing the strands so that they wouldn’t fall forward while she was playing.
“Are you going to play the piece you were practising?”
Jane laughed. “No, I’m not that good at it yet.”
“What then?”
She lifted her bow. “I’ll play the sarabande from Bach’s fourth cello suite. I like it better.”
Jane was used to being looked at when she performed but there was something different about playing for William and the gentle way he studied her face. Mikhail mostly followed her hands, and Jane’s father — when she was eight and nine and he still made time to listen to her — had mostly gazed at the floors or out the cottage window, as if gauging the music he was hearing by its effect, as sound pared off from the physical act of its production. Usually Jane looked down at her bowing hand or closed her eyes, unless she was in lessons, in which case she mostly watched Mikhail’s face, because she could tell by the set of his mouth whether she was succeeding or failing — and because secretly she was always anticipating the moment he’d shake his head, say, Stop, and instruct her to go back and do it again. The previous week, in the middle of the very sarabande she was playing for William, Mikhail had snapped his fingers and interrupted her, chiding her for a decision she’d made. “Lighter!” he said. “How do you walk through your house?” He stomped in place. “Like this? All the time? You’re always storming off? In the bourrée we think of steps, no?” He tapped the ground with his foot like a dancer. “But in the sarabande the accent is on the second beat.” He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a line of music on the board behind him. “Ornaments are here,” he said, “and here—unless you are indifferent. Start again.” She started again and he stopped her before she even got to the crescendo in bar seventeen. “It’s a decision, Jane. It’s a decision about what phrase is swallowed by, or swallows, the rest. The slur is too long technically to obey. So: decide. It’s the swell of it, okay? Like this—” He arced his hand up and let it fall. “You can play like everyone else da-da-da-dee if you want, but I thought we agreed you could start making decisions of your own now. No rushing through it. No thinking. Just feel.”
Jane made two minor mistakes in the sarabande she played for William, which wasn’t bad because the piece was technically above her skill level. It had almost no easy phrases and an emotional ambiguity that made Jane think of a scene from a ballet — the wood nymph who was up to no good stopping on his way to mischief to admire the beauty of the moon. Both times she hesitated she glanced up to see if William had noticed, but his expression didn’t change — he was watching her in a way that seemed completely free of judgment. She played everything after the crescendo with her eyes closed and when the last note lifted up and dissipated she opened them to find him leaning forward in his chair. When he didn’t applaud or say anything or do any of the usual stuff, Jane stood up, flexing and unflexing her left hand, her face flushing even as she willed it not to.