Lady in Rags

Chapter Fifty-One: Innocence

There was only one more thing to be decided, after the letter. Not decided, perhaps, but discovered. Neil confessed it two weeks later, when they were working in the library after putting Annie to bed.

"I want some help – remembering something."

Verity looked up from the cap she was embroidering for Annie. "From our past? What do you want to know?"

"I don't want you to tell me – I want to remember." He set down his pen, and closed the accounts book. "I have remembered a little, all along, about the first time we met. But only a little. I want to know all of it."

Verity's face fell. "Oh. Neil, it was... not a good beginning."

"I remembered as much." He came over and sat down on the couch with her. "I tried to – in a word – buy you."

"Neil..."

"Didn't I?" he pressed.

"In a word, yes – but it needs more than a word to describe it." She continued to weave her needle in and out of the blue ribbon, sewing it round the brim of the cap. "My father was more to blame than you, I fear."

"But I was to blame."

"Not so much I did not forgive you." She gave him a half-smile, and dropped the cap in her lap, so she could reach across and touch his hand. "Don't give me that look. What do you remember?"

He forced his frown to relax. "Everything, I think, until I open the door and see you standing there. Verity – will you go and ring the doorbell? I want to see if I can remember what happened next. Sometimes, when the now echoes what came before, memories come to me."

She looked very thoughtful for a moment. "I'll go. But if you don't remember, I'm going to tell you – it can't be as bad as you imagined. Your imagination is always too dark and vivid."

When she had left, he leaned back against the sofa and breathed in and out slowly to calm the nerves growing in his belly. A few moments later, the bell came ringing furiously through the hall. She kept ringing, as he ran for the door, and he felt a faint echo of irritation – how he had hated her for it last time. He was almost laughing as he pulled the door open.

The effect was different this time, because it was well past sunset, but seeing her there, he had the eerie, unreal feeling that they existed both in present and past simultaneously, as though time had melted into itself, and they stood independently of it.

"And then..." Her eyes had been bright with anger. Her cheeks flushed. It was incongruous to see the reality before him, when the memory was suddenly so concrete in his mind. "...You looked so proud. You don't look proud now."

She looked faintly sad. "I was proud." She stepped through, and he closed the door after her. Memory came to him like grains of sand through an hourglass.

"I sent you upstairs – to be dressed. The dress is in my cupboard. Will you go and put it on now?"

"Must I?"

"It's coming back to me – please."

Her lips were pressed tightly together. "Very well. You were waiting in the-"

"Library. I know."

It was not a long wait, but long enough for the nerves to rise like acid in his belly. When she appeared again at the door, he rose to meet her on feet that hardly felt the ground beneath him. The dress brought out the colour in her eyes, but it was almost indecently low in the bust and high in the ankles. Giulia had been shorter and more generously proportioned. She had been wearing it, last, at a dance the autumn before they had been ill, laughing, spinning, smiling.