Bellwood

Sylvie was invited to dinner at Bellwood and came home without a coat.

It was the first warm week of May, and it rained for four days. She had walked up the drive in the morning with the idea of walking back before dark and had stayed for lunch, and then the sky opened and Julian Reyes had said, absurdly, that she should not think of walking in it, and she had said, absurdly, that she would be fine, and in the end the housekeeper had put her in a guest room while her clothes dried and she had called home from the hall telephone in a voice thick with a cold that had come on in an afternoon.

By the second day she had a fever of a hundred and two.

Faye came off the telephone with the receiver still in her hand and put it down on the arm of the chair, where it lay ticking for an hour; then she went into the hall and buttoned her coat over her nightgown and stood at the foot of the stairs with the truck keys shut in her fist, and did not go anywhere. She said she would drive up. Gil said they owned one working truck and the drive was a river. She said she would send Tessa; Gil said Tessa would come home with pneumonia too. She said she would send for the doctor, who lived in Rhinebeck and did not make house calls, and she dialled four digits of his number with her finger shaking and put the receiver back on the arm of the chair.

"I will walk," Hollis said.

"Three miles in this?"

"Three miles in this," she said. Her mother opened her mouth. "Mother. She has a fever and she is in a strange house with people whose names we learned on Friday."

So she walked. The road up to Bellwood ran along the creek and then away from it, through the wet woods where the mayflowers were out, and the rain came down level and steady and the whole valley had gone soft and green and loud with water. She was soaked to the skin inside ten minutes. Her shoes filled. She walked with her head down and her arms folded, thinking about the tank gauge, thinking about Sylvie's voice on the telephone, thinking that if Roman Ashcroft were to come down that road in a car he would not stop, and that she would not ask him to, and that this fact gave her a strange, cold pleasure.

No car came.

She arrived at Bellwood at half past four, muddy to the thigh, and was shown into a sitting room with a fire in it, where Camille Reyes rose from a chair with an expression of the most exquisite distress.

"Miss Arden. You have walked."

"I have."

"In this. How very — how very Ashford of you. Your sister is upstairs and quite comfortable, and we have sent for nothing because there is nothing to send for. Come to the fire. You are dripping on the rug."

"I am dripping on the rug," Hollis agreed, and stood where she was dripping.

Camille Reyes, who had not offered a coat or a towel, went on being distressed for another minute and then gave it up and sat down, and there was a silence during which Hollis could feel the room taking her measure: the mud on her boots, the hands that had been in a cider cellar since February. Roman Ashcroft was sitting in a chair by the window with a book open on his knee that he was not reading. He had looked at her when she came in. He looked at her again now, at her hands, and then away, and Hollis put her hands behind her back, and then brought them out again because that was worse, and left them where they were.

"Your sister," he said, without turning, "is upstairs in the north room. The doctor has been. It is a fever and not a lung."

"Thank you," she said.

He said nothing further. Camille Reyes said a great deal further. Hollis answered, and was pleasant, and was a little sharp, and watched Camille Reyes's mouth tighten in the particular way it tightened whenever Hollis said something that a person of education might have said. Sylvie's illness became, in the course of an hour, a contest. Hollis won it by being entirely indifferent to winning, which is the only way to win that kind of contest.

Dinner was at half past seven, and Hollis went down to it in a borrowed dress two sizes too big with her hair still damp, and found herself at a table of seven where everyone else had changed.

Julian Reyes was at the head of it doing the work of four hosts. Trevor Voss said almost nothing and ate a great deal. Laurel Voss asked after Sylvie in the voice of a woman reading from a card. Camille Reyes, who had changed into black, was in excellent spirits and spent the first quarter of an hour being agreeable to Hollis in a manner that had a purpose behind it, which Hollis took a further ten minutes to identify.

"It is a great pity," Camille said, over the fish, "that the country has given up accomplishments. In my grandmother's house a girl of two-and-twenty could play and sing and draw and speak French and carry on a conversation in it, and now one meets young women who can do none of these things and are not in the least distressed by it."

"I am not in the least distressed by it," said Hollis.

"No. That is what I mean."

"I can make cider," said Hollis. "I can drive a tractor with a loader on it. I can graft. I can read a balance sheet, which I learned because nobody else in my family would. I can put up four hundred jars of preserves in a week. I have never once been asked to speak French."

"A woman should have," said Roman Ashcroft, from three chairs away, "a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing and the modern languages, to deserve the word. And to all that she must add something more substantial: the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."

Hollis put her fork down. "That is a very great list."

"It is the list."

"It is a list of the things a man would like to be able to buy. It is not a description of a person." She looked at him. "And I notice that no one has ever proposed a list for men. No one has ever said that a man should be able to ride, and shoot, and read Latin, and dance, and speak Italian, and improve his mind by extensive reading, and therefore deserve the word. The list is only ever applied to one half of the world, and the half it is applied to is the half with no money."

Camille Reyes made a small sound of delight.

"I did not say it was a test of worth," said Roman Ashcroft. "I said it was a description."

"You said 'deserve the word.'"

"I stand by it."

"Then I am afraid I do not deserve the word, and I am obliged to report that I have been extremely happy about it for twenty-two years."

Julian Reyes, who had been watching this with his chin on his hand, said, "Ashcroft, you have been out-argued by a woman in a borrowed dress who walked three miles in the rain today, and you are going to be gracious about it or I will be uncivil to you for a week."

"I am never gracious," said Roman Ashcroft. "I am, however, occasionally wrong. Miss Arden, you are right about the list. You are wrong to suppose that I invented it."

Trevor Voss said, "Is there any more of that fish."

Camille Reyes, whose purpose had been to expose Hollis and who had instead produced the most interesting twenty minutes of the week, put her napkin down and said, "You are very fond of arguing."

"I am very fond of winning," said Hollis, and Trevor Voss said, "Is there any more of that fish," again, and Laurel Voss asked after Sylvie in the voice of a woman reading from a card a second time, and the conversation broke up into pieces.

In the hall, on the way upstairs, she heard herself say good night to Camille Reyes in exactly the voice Camille Reyes used, and heard Nina laugh behind her, and knew then what the evening had been. She had enjoyed herself. And the man who had insulted her at a dance had, in the space of forty seconds, told her she was right and stood by the thing he had said anyway, and she had not once in that exchange wanted to win less.

She went up. Sylvie lay in a big bed with the windows cracked and the sound of rain in the maples, and her face when Hollis came in was worth the walk.

"You walked," she said.

"I walked."

"You are filthy."

"I am extremely filthy. You have a visitor, by the way." And Hollis sat on the edge of the bed and repeated, word for word, with the fire in it and the rain outside and her sister's hot hand on her wrist, the conversation she had overheard by the coffee urn, and Sylvie laughed until she coughed, and then lay back and said, "He did not mean it."

"He meant every syllable."

"He will come to like you. People do."

"Not this one," said Hollis. "And I do not want him to."

Five days she stayed. On the third day Julian Reyes came up with flowers from the greenhouse and sat on the bed and talked to Sylvie for an hour about nothing at all, and Hollis, who was in the room, watched her sister's face do something it had never done and thought: there it is. On the fourth day Camille Reyes began to be kind to Sylvie and to be unkind to Hollis in a manner so precise and so ceaseless that Hollis spent the afternoon in the library reading a book about soil chemistry purely to avoid her, and Roman Ashcroft came in to get something and found her there and said, "You are hiding."

"I am reading."

"You are reading a book about soil chemistry in a room with four hundred better books in it. You are hiding."

"I am reading about soil chemistry because I have an orchard," she said, "and you are in a room with four hundred better books in it because you were looking for something. Did you find it?"

"No," he said, and went out.

On the fifth day Sylvie was well enough to be moved, and Faye insisted — against Gil's dry, delighted prediction — that the truck could not possibly come up the drive in the mud, and so Sylvie stayed one more night and came home on the sixth, and the whole valley knew by Sunday that Julian Reyes had been attentive and that the marriage was as good as made.

Hollis came home to a cider tank that had gone wrong while she was away and spent two days fixing it, and did not think about Roman Ashcroft at all, except in the way that a person does not think about a splinter they have decided not to take out.